VMware recently announced what it described as a very strong finish in Q4, ending the company's 2013 fiscal year on a high note. VMware's total revenue for 2013 was $5.2 billion, up 17 percent (excluding Pivotal and divestitures) year over year.

With a strong performance in Q4 and in 2013 as a whole, VMware stated on the company's earnings call that it has accelerated growth and are well positioned for a strong 2014. Part of the company's acceleration and positioning can be attributed by an eye to the future with VMware NSX in mind, the company's network virtualization platform. The company will also continue to focus its strategic priorities across the software-defined data center (SDDC) and hybrid cloud.

If you've spent any time over the last few months at a cloud trade show or a VMware event, chances are you've already been bombarded with the SDN acronym. Software-defined networking and network virtualization are hot topics right now, and it's evident from VMware's latest financial announcement that the company expects a significant uptick in its adoption this year.

What exactly are we talking about here?

SDN allows administrators to manage network services through abstraction of lower-level functionality. SDN enables agile management of network traffic by decoupling the control plane from the underlying data plane. A protocol such as OpenFlow is used to promote communication between the two.

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Read the entire InfoWorld Virtualization Report article.