In the world of enterprise IT, when a new technology or trend starts to become popular, everyone tries to leverage it, whether their particular products or services have anything to do with that technology or not.

We’ve seen this happen a lot over the years, with the abuse of cloud computing being so egregious that the term “cloud washing” was coined to describe vendors pitching products that were cloud in name only.

Check out Day 1 2015, and past VMworld TechPro coverage:

And as Software Defined Networking (SDN) grew in importance over the last couple of years, we saw a similar trend. All of a sudden, lots and lots of products and services were “software defined” despite having nothing to do with SDN, OpenFlow, or even the basic principles of dynamic, autonomous, and flexible infrastructure systems that “software defined” implies. Usually, it just means the product had management software (the same management software it always had).

However, at this week’s VMworld 2015 conference in San Francisco, there was a refreshing change in the air. While there were still a few examples of vendors and products engaging in “SD Washing,” a good number of the products and services I saw at the show were legitimately and effectively implementing software defined technologies and principles. And this wasn’t just in networking — I saw software defined examples across the entire IT stack.

There were hyper-converged systems that leverage software defined (that’s an impressive marketing term convergence) to improve flexibility, management, and performance of their systems. SD-WAN, which at first sounded like a misnomer, showed its true colors with offerings that help bring the corporate WAN more effectively into a modern world of cloud computing and SaaS (one that had seemed to be ready to leave the WAN behind). And, of course, there were advanced monitoring and management tools that used software defined technology to create IT infrastructures that evolve to meet the changing needs of businesses.

This is an excellent sign that software defined is now moving from ‘hype’ to ‘getting things done.’ It usually happens with all new technologies that have real staying power — which software defined systems certainly have.

For more information on the current adoption of SDN by businesses, check out the report, SDN: Do Believe the Hype, available free to registered Aberdeen community members.