This week at Interop New York, HP announced its strategy for Software Defined Networking (SDN), an emerging set of standards and technologies that aim to automate and simplify networking via programmable interfaces.

HP announced that its 3800 family of campus switches now supports OpenFlow, a standard that lets a controller interact with switches and routers.

The company also announced a virtual controller and SDN applications for security and load balancing. The controller and applications are currently in beta. HP expects them to be available in 2013.

"This is network virtualization," said Bethany Mayer, senior vice president and general manager of HP Networking. "And it's not just low-level APIs. It's a single point of control for the network using OpenFlow to provision and modify the forwarding path of packets across the infrastructure. And we offer open APIs to support new applications we are developing along the way."