PANTHEON.tech Arms OpenDaylight for the Demands of the AI Era

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia – January 14, 2026 – As the artificial intelligence boom places unprecedented strain on network infrastructure, PANTHEON.tech, a key architect of the open-source Software-Defined Networking (SDN) landscape, has announced a critical upgrade to the industry’s most pervasive controller. The company has successfully integrated the gRPC Network Management Interface (gNMI) into OpenDaylight, a move designed to bridge the gap between open-source innovation and the stringent reliability demands of enterprise-scale AI.

This development directly confronts the performance bottlenecks that threaten to stall progress in AI and machine learning. By equipping OpenDaylight with modern, real-time telemetry capabilities, PANTHEON.tech is positioning the controller to manage the lossless, ultra-low latency networks that power the next generation of data centers.

The Breaking Point for Legacy Networks

The rise of massive AI training clusters and disaggregated network fabrics has exposed the limitations of traditional network management protocols. For decades, the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) has been a staple, but its foundational “pull” model, where a central manager polls devices for status updates at set intervals, is proving wholly inadequate for modern workloads.

AI training is uniquely sensitive to network performance. It requires the continuous, high-speed transfer of enormous datasets between thousands of GPUs. Industry research validates that these environments demand lossless networks, where even momentary packet loss can derail complex calculations, leading to wasted compute cycles and significant delays. To meet this need, AI fabrics are being built with high-speed, 400 Gb/s and emerging 800 Gb/s Ethernet, along with technologies like RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) to ensure zero packet loss. In this high-stakes environment, the slow, intermittent data provided by SNMP is a critical blind spot, unable to provide the real-time visibility needed to prevent or instantly react to congestion and failures.

“The industry is pivoting toward open networking with SONiC and high-scale AI fabrics, creating a specific demand for a gNMI-capable controller,” said Miroslav Mikluš, CPO of PANTHEON.tech, in the original announcement. The inadequacy of legacy tools has created a clear and urgent need for a new paradigm in network visibility.

A Proactive Shift with gNMI

PANTHEON.tech's solution addresses this challenge by replacing the reactive pull model with a proactive, streaming-based “push” model. The gNMI protocol, built on the high-performance gRPC framework, allows network devices to stream telemetry data—such as link status, buffer utilization, and error counts—to the OpenDaylight controller in real time. This ensures that network issues are detected the moment they occur, not minutes later during the next polling cycle.

This shift is more than just an increase in speed; it represents a fundamental change in network management philosophy. With gNMI, the network becomes an active participant in its own management. “Our gNMI plugin moves the industry to a proactive ‘push’ model, ensuring the network communicates issues like link failures or buffer overflows the moment they occur,” Mikluš explained.

This capability is crucial for unlocking the full potential of modern network architectures like SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud), which are increasingly optimized for AI-scale workloads. The market reflects this technological pivot, with the gNMI Streaming Telemetry market, valued at over $1.1 billion in 2024, projected to grow at a compound annual rate of nearly 19% through 2033. PANTHEON.tech’s integration ensures OpenDaylight, a platform already dominant in telecommunication clouds, remains relevant and essential in this rapidly evolving landscape.

Fortifying Open Source for the Enterprise

While open-source projects like OpenDaylight offer unparalleled flexibility and innovation, enterprises often hesitate to adopt them for mission-critical systems due to concerns about stability, support, and unpredictable upgrade cycles. PANTHEON.tech has built its business model around addressing these concerns, effectively acting as a bridge between the agile world of open-source development and the risk-averse nature of large enterprises.

The company’s claim as a “primary contributor” to OpenDaylight is well-substantiated; it is recognized as one of the largest and most active corporate contributors, with key employees serving on the project’s Technical Steering Committee. This deep involvement provides them with the expertise to offer enterprise-grade versions of the software.

Through its “Hardened Distributions” of OpenDaylight, PANTHEON.tech provides code that has been rigorously scanned for security vulnerabilities and optimized for stability. It offers Long-Term Support (LTS) contracts that shield customers from the aggressive six-month community release cycle, providing a stable environment for years. This is complemented by guaranteed Service Level Agreements (SLAs), 24/7 support, and direct access to the top engineers who develop the code, transforming a community-driven project into a reliable, commercially supported product.

Accelerating Development with lighty.io

Beyond just hardening the core product, PANTHEON.tech is also focused on improving the developer experience within the OpenDaylight ecosystem. A significant contribution in this area is lighty.io, a cloud-native SDK designed to accelerate the development of SDN microservices.

Historically, developing applications for OpenDaylight required working within the Apache Karaf container, an OSGi-based runtime that, while powerful, can introduce complexity and overhead. Lighty.io removes this dependency, allowing developers to build SDN applications in a plain Java environment. This results in faster startup times, a smaller memory footprint, and a more modular application architecture that aligns perfectly with modern cloud-native and microservices trends.

The SDK simplifies the entire development lifecycle, from building to testing, and its legitimacy is underscored by its adoption within the broader OpenDaylight community. The successful migration of the TransportPCE project to lighty.io, which has been integrated into the upstream OpenDaylight project, serves as a powerful testament to its value and growing acceptance. By making OpenDaylight more accessible and efficient for developers, PANTHEON.tech is ensuring the platform continues to foster a vibrant ecosystem of innovation. This focus on both enterprise stability and developer agility solidifies OpenDaylight's role as a foundational component for building the complex, automated networks of the future.