Transport IP/optical networks are evolving in capacity and dynamicity configuration. This evolution gives little to no attention to the specific needs of applications, beyond raw capacity. The ACINO concept is based on facilitating applications to explicitly specify requirements for requested services in terms of high-level (technology agnostic) requirements such as maximum latency or reliability. These requirements are described using intents and certain primitives which facilitate translation to technology specific configuration within the ACINO infrastructure. To support this application centric approach, SDN must have a key role in this evolution. There are representative use cases where SDN gives an added value when considering not only the network but also the application layer.