Who's going to sell hardware if not for the networking giants though? While hardware may be a declining business in terms of revenue it doesn't mean that there's no business either. After all, the big cloud providers will all have to source hardware from someone even if everyone goes whole hog into the OCP ecosystem with cheap, large scale vendors based primarily in low cost of business regions. Who's better equipped to handle economies of scale better than large companies in our world? Did I miss something about manufacturing trends being disrupted in the past 15 years?

If anything, these vendors would want some say on the SDN systems so that their hardware can better integrate with them and offer more compelling value than their competitors.