Network as a service: A new vista of opportunities

The networking industry, compared to the computer industry, has been slow in evolving from a closed ecosystem with limited abstractions to a more open ecosystem with well-defined, sophisticated, high-level abstractions. This has resulted in an ossified Internet architecture that inhibits innovation and is unnecessarily complex. Fortunately, there has been an exciting flux of rapid developments in networking in recent times, with prominent trends emerging that have brought us to the cusp of a major paradigm shift.