The OpenDaylight Project may have won attention last week with a founding list of vendors including Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks, but it’s standing on the shoulders of others, according to the head of the Open Networking Foundation.

OpenDaylight will be building part of its planned framework for software-defined networking on the OpenFlow protocol that ONF introduced in 2011, ONF Executive Director Dan Pitt said on Tuesday at the Open Networking Summit. The standing-room-only conference is ONF‘s annual gathering to discuss SDN (software-defined networking), which is intended to place the control of networks in software apart from dedicated hardware.

“It’s sort of an evolution of what we were doing,” Pitt said in answer to an audience member’s question at the conference in Santa Clara, California. “I don’t think you would be able to start this … OpenDaylight consortium if you didn’t have a foundation to build upon.”

Specifically, OpenDaylight’s planned API (application programming interface) for communication between its controller software and network devices will be built on OpenFlow, Pitt said. That’s despite the fact that ONF is not a member of OpenDaylight, which includes a long list of major IT and networking vendors including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Ericsson.

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