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Sarah Conway

Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) Project Doubles Members, Community and Projects in First Six Months

By News

Comcast, Infosys and Major Networking Vendors Join ONAP to Bolster The Project’s Global Potential

SAN FRANCISCO, July 31, 2017 — Building on its technical momentum and rapid community growth, the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) Project today announced that Comcast, Fujitsu, Infosys, Netcracker Technology and Samsung joined as new members to contribute to the open source framework for network automation.

Just six months after launching, ONAP has doubled its roster of members, community participants and projects to more than 900 contributors, 50 members and 30 projects. The addition of Comcast and major Japanese and Korean companies, illustrate ONAP’s increasingly global impact and potential to transform and automate networks with SDN/NFV.

The rapidly growing community is working to deliver a neutral automation platform for network, infrastructure and services across service providers, cloud providers and enterprises challenged to provide on-demand services profitably and competitively, while leveraging existing investments.

Combined with this solid foundation, the new members are helping fuel ONAP’s uptick on all fronts. The technical community is making swift progress on the first release, Amsterdam. Due out later this year, Amsterdam will be the first ONAP release to integrate the original OPEN-O and ECOMP code bases into a common, powerful orchestration platform. To move Amsterdam forward, the technical community met this week and plans to convene outside of Paris in late September.

Additionally, the ONAP community has banded together to establish a number of projects and technologies essential to VNF orchestration that combine key features from both the OPEN-O and ECOMP platforms. This includes a collection of tools and guidelines that are designed to help vendors create, integrate and validate their VNFs with ONAP. As part of this work, ONAP also announces the acceptance of ICE.

ICE, developed at the AT&T Foundry in Palo Alto, Calif., is an incubation and validation platform for VNF’s that the TSC recently made a part of ONAP. Now known as the VNF Validation Program (ICE) Project, it includes a defined validation process and scripts that will form the basis of the certification and self-test programs for ONAP. This new project, along with the VNF Requirements Project and the VNF SDK Project that draw on code from OPEN-O and ECOMP, will define how VNFs can obtain an ONAP Compatible Label. Additional key areas of integration include service orchestration, deployment and monitoring of VNFs along with closed loop automation.

Furthermore, several uses cases required for carrier networks of the future have also been approved by the TSC, including Residential Broadband vCPE, vFW/vDNS and VoLTE.

With a vibrant and growing community committed to ONAP’s success, more than 10 global mobile service operators representing 43 percent of the worldwide mobile market are planning to use ONAP to build and deliver the connected world of the future.

“We’re excited to add new geographic and industry perspectives to ONAP and incredibly impressed with the progress the technical community is making with the first release,” said Arpit Joshipura, General Manager, Networking at The Linux Foundation.Our growth in the past few months alone proves telecommunications, cable/cloud operators and solution providers believe there is a clear need for a common platform for rapidly designing, implementing and managing differentiated services with meaningful cost savings.”

More about the newest members:

Comcast Corporation (Nasdaq: CMCSA) is a global media and technology company with two primary businesses, Comcast Cable and NBCUniversal. Comcast Cable is one of the nation’s largest video, high-speed internet, and phone providers to residential customers under the XFINITY brand, and also provides these services to businesses. It also provides wireless and security and automation services to residential customers under the XFINITY brand. NBCUniversal operates news, entertainment and sports cable networks, the NBC and Telemundo broadcast networks, television production operations, television station groups, Universal Pictures and Universal Parks and Resorts. Visit www.comcastcorporation.com for more information.

Fujitsu is the leading Japanese information and communication technology (ICT) company, offering a full range of technology products, solutions, and services. The company uses its experience and the power of ICT to shape the future of society with its customers. ONAP membership will help Fujitsu further advance networks for enterprises and services providers eager to adopt SDN/NFV.

Infosys is a global leader in technology services and consulting. The company enables clients in 45 countries to create and execute strategies for their digital transformation. From engineering to application development, knowledge management and business process management, Infosys helps clients find the right problems to solve, and to solve these effectively.

The ONAP platform will be beneficial to Infosys clients aiming to leverage their networks to deliver new on-demand, cloud services.

Netcracker Technology, a wholly owned subsidiary of NEC Corporation, is a forward-looking software company, offering mission-critical solutions to service providers around the globe. Its comprehensive portfolio of software solutions and professional services enables large-scale digital transformations, unlocking the opportunities of the cloud, virtualization and the changing mobile ecosystem. With an unbroken service delivery track record of more than 20 years, Netcracker’s unique combination of technology, people and expertise help companies transform their networks and enable better experiences for their customers.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. inspires the world and shapes the future with transformative ideas and technologies. The company is redefining the worlds of TVs, smartphones, wearable devices, tablets, digital appliances, network systems, and memory, system LSI and LED solutions. For the latest news, please visit the Samsung Newsroom at

http://news.samsung.com.

Samsung will jointly collaborate with many global operators and solutions providers to generate alternatives to proprietary, purpose-built orchestration tools, as well as turn APIs and an open development platform into commercial-grade solutions.

All are invited to join the ONAP Technical Steering Committee to work on this shared framework for automation of virtual network functions.

Additional Resources

About ONAP

The Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) Project brings together top global carriers and vendors with the goal of allowing end users to automate, design, orchestrate and manage services and virtual functions. ONAP unites two major open networking and orchestration projects, open source ECOMP and the Open Orchestrator Project (OPEN-O), with the mission of creating a unified architecture and implementation and supporting collaboration across the open source community. The ONAP Project is a Linux Foundation project. For more information, visit https://www.onap.org.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) Project Gains Industry Momentum with New Members and Significant Technical Progress

By News

New Members Include Leading Global Service Providers and Vendors; Community Pushes Forward on Merged Architecture and Announces Next Developer Forum in China in June

SAN FRANCISCO, June 8, 2017 — The Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) Project today announced that Accenture, CertusNet, Coriant, Juniper Networks, Mavenir, Mirantis, PCCW Global, Red Hat, VEON and Windstream joined as new members to contribute to the open source framework for network automation.

Creating a sustainable ecosystem in support of ONAP will enable operators and vendors to foster innovation and avoid fragmentation of software-defined networks (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) platforms.

ONAP recently announced production-ready code and documentation and continues to make significant technical progress. The growing, vibrant technical ONAP community is working to deliver a neutral automation platform for network, infrastructure and services across service providers, cloud providers and enterprises in today’s software-defined, virtualized era.

Nearly 200 developers, representing major telecom and networking organizations from around the world, met recently in May to map out ONAP’s functional architecture. The group, which will meet again in June 8-9 in Beijing, began identifying project definitions and uses cases like vCPE and VoLTE. Later this year, ONAP plans to release an architecture that seamlessly integrates open source ECOMP and the Open Orchestrator Project (OPEN-O) to support the coming wave of 5G, IoT and cloud applications and services.  

“I’m incredibly pleased with the technical energy behind ONAP and the progress the community is making,” said Arpit Joshipura, General Manager, Networking at The Linux Foundation. “The turnout at our first face-to-face developer gathering was amazing. With today’s news, the ONAP braintrust continues to expand, representing more than 35 organizations from around the world. ONAP enables a new business model of faster innovation and is now an integral part of all major vendors in Networking Community.”

Today’s new members recognize that ONAP will disrupt the market, automating the network to deliver efficiencies and business agility to carriers and vendors alike. Current members include a broad mix of major vendors, service providers, system integrators and consultancies: Amdocs, ARM, AT&T, Bell Canada, BOCO Inter-Telecom, Canonical, China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, Ciena, Cisco, Cloudbase Solutions, Ericsson, GigaSpaces, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Metaswitch, Microsoft, H3C Technologies, Nokia, Open Networking Foundation, Orange, Raisecom, Reliance Jio, Tech Mahindra, VMware, Wind River and ZTE.

More about the newest members:

Accenture is a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range of services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations. Combining unmatched experience and specialized skills across more than 40 industries and all business functions – underpinned by the world’s largest delivery network – Accenture works at the intersection of business and technology to help clients improve their performance and create sustainable value for their stakeholders. With approximately 401,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries, Accenture drives innovation to improve the way the world works and lives. Working with many global communication service providers, Accenture has vast expertise in building next-generation platforms and SDN/NFV-powered ecosystems, all of which will be beneficial to ONAP.  

CertusNet is a world-leading information platform and solution provider. As a pioneer and an advocate of Elastic Network and Elastic Services concepts, the company is committed to providing Elastic Network services covering carrier-grade SDN/NFV solutions, cloud computing, and end-to-end customer experience assurance for global users, enterprises and government agencies. CertusNet strives to continuously improve the user experience, facilitate new services and applications, and help customers generate greater value with its widely trusted Elastic Services. Already a member of OPNFV, by joining industry leaders in the ONAP project, CertusNet is stepping up its contribution to open networks and standards-based software development.

Coriant is a global supplier of SDN-enabled end-to-end packet optical networking and DCI solutions that enable network operators to cost-efficiently scale network capacity, reduce operational complexity, and create the resilient foundation for a new generation of mobile, video, and cloud services. The company is joining ONAP to help accelerate industry adoption of SDN and NFV capabilities that orchestrate and automate service delivery in cloud-centric, SDN-controlled networks.

Juniper Networks challenges the status quo with products, solutions and services that transform the economics of networking. Its team co-innovates with customers and partners to deliver automated, scalable and secure networks with agility, performance and value.

Mavenir accelerates and redefines mobile network transformation for Service Providers, by offering a comprehensive product portfolio across every layer of the network infrastructure stack. From 5G application/service layers to packet core and RAN – Mavenir leads the way in evolved, cloud-native networking solutions enabling innovative and secure experiences for end users. Through its industry first VoLTE, VoWiFi, Advanced Messaging (RCS), Multi ID, Visual Voicemail and Cloud RAN solutions, Mavenir’s platform and mobile expertise will be an asset to the project as it develops cutting-edge use cases like IoT and 5G.

Mirantis delivers open cloud infrastructure to top enterprises using OpenStack, Kubernetes and related open source technologies. The company follows a build-operate-transfer model to deliver its Mirantis Cloud Platform and cloud management services, empowering customers to take advantage of open source innovation with no vendor lock-in. The company has built deep expertise in open source and orchestration in their work with OpenStack, which the company will leverage in their contributions to the ONAP community.

PCCW Global, the international operating division of HKT, Hong Kong’s premier telecommunications service provider, which is majority-owned by PCCW Limited, adds to ONAP’s significant member presence in Asia. Covering more than 3,000 cities and 150 countries, the PCCW Global network supports a portfolio of integrated global communications solutions which include Ethernet, IP, fiber and satellite transmission solutions, international voice and VoIPX services, managed network and security services and expanding “as-a-service” solutions including OTT video and Unified Communications. PCCW Global chose to be part of ONAP with the aim of providing a telco perspective to the organization and to collaborate with all members to expand its scope from a single domain to a multi-domain/carrier environment. This will help achieve operational scale and efficiency as well as ease interoperability.

Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to provide reliable and high-performing cloud, Linux, middleware, storage and virtualization technologies. Red Hat also offers award-winning support, training, and consulting services. As a connective hub in a global network of enterprises, partners, and open source communities, Red Hat helps create innovative technologies designed to liberate resources for growth and prepare customers for the future of IT. The telecommunications industry is accelerating innovation and interoperability in the management and orchestration of NFV applications, and Red Hat is enthusiastic about helping to advance this industry trend.

VEON, a NASDAQ and Euronext Amsterdam listed global provider of communications services, formerly known as VimpelCom, aspires to lead the personal internet revolution for more than 235 million customers it serves today, and many others in the years to come. Headquartered in Amsterdam, VEON’s business ties in Eurasia, Russia, Ukraine, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Italy expand ONAP’s footprint across Europe and Asia.

Windstream Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: WIN), a FORTUNE 500 company, is a leading provider of advanced network communications and technology solutions for consumers, small businesses, enterprise organizations and carrier partners across the U.S. Windstream offers bundled services, including broadband, security solutions, voice and digital TV to consumers. The company also provides data, cloud solutions, unified communications and managed services to business and enterprise clients. The company supplies core transport solutions on a local and long-haul fiber-optic network spanning approximately 147,000 miles. Additional information is available at windstream.com and https://www.windstream.com/siteselector/. The company joins a number of telecommunication service providers already supporting ONAP.

All are invited to join the ONAP Technical Steering Committee to work on this shared framework for automation of virtual network functions.

Additional Resources

About ONAP

The Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) Project brings together top global carriers and vendors with the goal of allowing end users to automate, design, orchestrate and manage services and virtual functions. ONAP unites two major open networking and orchestration projects, open source ECOMP and the Open Orchestrator Project (OPEN-O), with the mission of creating a unified architecture and implementation and supporting collaboration across the open source community. The ONAP Project is a Linux Foundation project. For more information, visit https://www.onap.org.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.