Cisco is one of the most practised of vendors at pushing the technologies it controls into standards, and it comes as no surprise that it should attempt this in SDN (software defined networking). At the Interop event this week, it is showing off an alternative to OpenFlow, and proposing it as a standard, trying to pull the nascent sector towards a model which is very different from the one adopted for mainstream SDN so far. OpenFlow is an increasingly widely adopted standard for the forwarding plane of network equipment, but its open source nature makes it alien to Cisco, which has little ability to control it. The networking giant’s traditional model, based on proprietary hardware, is threatened by SDN, but…