Reportedly prodded by IBM, Dell has moved to try to eclipse a hush-hush Cisco attempt to ride roughshod over software-defined networking (SDN) and rally the industry behind a proprietary Cisco standard in a consortium code-named Daylight.

News of the counter-insurgency is reportedly supposed to hit the wires Tuesday.

Cisco and a few friends have reportedly been putting together an SDN consortium code-named "Daylight." It was supposedly meant to create an open source SDN controller with Cisco as the reference architecture for OpenFlow and SDN.

And the move supposedly had it in for VMware. At least that's been the buzz around town.

The consortium reportedly included Cisco, HP, NEC and Citrix. Evidently Cisco is still ticked over its buddy VMware buying Nicira, the promising SDN and network virtualization start-up, last year.

According to SDNCentral, the only folks who seem to have initially noticed what's been going on, the Daylight consortium was supposed to be modeled on the Apache and OpenStack Foundations.

The blog had IBM as a partner but that was reportedly wrong. IBM evidently doesn't want any part of a consortium pledged to somebody else's proprietary widgetry like Cisco's OnePK SDK and its proprietary version of the OpenFlow protocol.

Big Blue was evidently able to entice Dell into the anti-Daylight movement because Dell is historically devoted to industry standards.

Dell reportedly means to reorganize the movement under the banner of the Open Network Foundation in a project that it chairs.

When last we heard Dell had a bank of people making calls seeking buy-in by other companies and thought it had at least signed up VMware, NTT, Google, Microsoft and Big Switch, some of whom may be straddling the fence. Other possibilities include Deutsche Telecom, Verizon, Stanford University and Goldman Sachs.

Earlier on SDNCentral figured Cisco had kicked in its core controller functionality, including OpenFlow; HP was supposedly good for L2 network services; and Citrix had come up service chaining.

The widgetry was reportedly supposed to be Java-based, with high availability and clustering, licensed on Apache 2 terms.

SDNCentral expected the controller to be shipping by the end of the year, doubtlessly working on KVM and/or OpenStack. And, tellingly, the Daylight controller wouldn't have any gateways to VXLAN or VMware/Nicira.

It was apparently supposed to be an open source alternative to VMware, or specifically to vSphere and Nicira and Daylight movement might have first see the light of day around the Open Networking Summit next month.

See www.sdncentral.com/companies/spotlight-on-daylight-sdn-consortium-open-source-controller/2013/02/.