The new keyword is SDN I guess - software-defined network. A lot of what was the standard in networking and hardware domain is migrating to software now. Especially when you're running many dynamic virtual hosts, you may want to move the tricky networking parts into easy to redefine software configuration on the host itself.

This idea will get only more popular soon. Of course there are also products that allow you driving the physical boxes remotely - like openflow. I think the mix of those technologies will get quite important in the future. I'm not sure if that's what the GP meant though.

Clouds, software-defined networks, virtual machines etc.