It's certainly not advanced - in a nutshell, they are moving the networking stack away from proprietary hardware and towards x86, although that of course does not preclude proprietary features from popping up in other places. This (http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/6/4/openflowsdn-is-not-...) is probably the best "layperson" (and I use that term _very_ loosely in this forum) explanation of the problem space.