The concept of Network Coding (NC) has been rapidly evolving over the recent years. Despite showing great potential for increasing robustness and performance when deployed on intermediate nodes, it is usually only utilised on an end-to-end basis. Meanwhile the use of Software Defined Networking (SDN) is expanding beyond the borders of the data centres, primarily used for coordination and network management without adding reliability. This report advocates a merger of NC functionality into SDN in order to cater the needs of emerging and future communication network scenarios. The contributions include extended coding functionality that follows the general work-flow of SDN and traditional network equipment in order to minimise any disruptions an eventual implementation may cause. Simple network coding approaches have been developed and deployed along with conventional communication protocols in a setup imitating a software defined network. The results argue that by extending the functionality of SDN it is possible to bring some of the advantages of NC to existing communication networks without breaking the functionality of the conventional protocol stack. Finally, we advocate the use of NC and SDN to lighten network load by performing proactive caching on intermediate network nodes.