In The News

With its promise of greater efficiencies and agility, automation is driving many network operator strategies these days — that much is evident from quantifiable industry research and from the very public announcements being made by the biggest names in the telecoms world.

The research was undertaken by Heavy Reading (the smart arm of the Light Reading empire): Operator respondents were asked to identify the three most important aspects of digital transformation, and 143 of the 150 service providers surveyed earlier this year cited process automation. Virtualization came in second with 130 votes. (See Process Automation Tops Carriers’ Goals for NFV.)

By that time, AT&T had already folded its ECOMP (Enhanced Control Orchestration, Management and Policy) code, developed during the past few years, into an open source project called ONAP, or Open Network Automation Platform — the name says it all. (See MANO Marriage: ECOMP, OPEN-O Converge as ONAP.)

Read more at Light Reading.

Carriers and service providers are working very hard to implement complex virtualized schemes across their networks. That’s a big part of the game, but not the entire challenge.

Another important element is making sure that services run across different networks without issue. They must maintain the same level of service and ease of use across various boundaries as if only one network is being used.

Read more at IT Business Edge.

The telco industry has long clamored for more cooperation between open source communities and standard development organizations, so today’s announcement that MEF and ONAP had agreed to collaborate on end-to-end automated and orchestrated services was welcome news.

With the memorandum of understanding, MEF is now an associate member of both Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) and the Linux Foundation. In turn, the Linux Foundation is now an auditing member of MEF. Together, ONAP and MEF have more than 250 member companies in the combined fold. (See MEF, ONAP Collaborate on LSO, Automation.)

Read more at Telco Transformation.

Open source community leader ONAP is teaming up with standards body MEF to further harmonize open source efforts ahead of 5G.

Arpit Joshipura, GM of Networking and Orchestration at the Linux Foundation, told Wireless Week the agreement will allow for “collaboration between open source and open standards.”

Read more Wireless Week.

AT&T’s open source ECOMP initiative, which aims to bring a higher level of standardization to the automation of communications service creation and turn-up, is having a broad industry impact, as news today of a MEF-Linux Foundation agreement illustrates.

The Linux Foundation and the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) announced a memorandum of understanding aimed at coordinating their efforts on service orchestration – and according to Arpit Joshipura, general manager of networking and orchestration for the Linux Foundation, ECOMP plays a big role on the Linux Foundation’s side of the agreement.

Read more at TeleCompetitor.

MEF and the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP), a Linux Foundation project, have signed a memorandum of understanding to establish service orchestration for service providers interconnecting diverse networks and technologies.

MEF published the Sonata and Presto APIs and said it would work together with the Open Network Automation Platform to determine how automation and orchestration can be managed in software-based environments using MEF APIs as a foundation. The groups made the announcements this week at the SDN NFV World Congress in The Hague, Netherlands.

Read more at TechTarget. 

MEF and the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) are officially working together, the organizations announced today at the SDN and NFV World Congress. MEF has joined ONAP as an associate member. And the Linux Foundation, which hosts ONAP, has joined MEF as an auditing member.

They say their relationship brings open source and standards together to further their shared vision for service orchestration across multiple providers.

Read more at SDxCentral.

Amdocs is wasting no time introducing service creation capabilities for virtual network functions (VNFs) based on the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP). Today, Amdocs announced its new NFV Powered by ONAP portfolio.

Even as ONAP continues the work of merging code from two open source projects, Amdocs is simultaneously touting its new offering. Its NFV Powered by ONAP portfolio brings software that lets service providers design new services based on VNFs. The software will help to create the services, orchestrate them, and then operate them.

Read more at SDxCentral.

ONAP’s addition of Vodafone to its platinum member roster not only adds the voice of one of the largest global carriers and earliest implementers of NFV-SDN to the open source project, but also means ONAP now represents more than half of global telecom subscribers. (See Vodafone Joins ONAP.)

Read more at Light Reading.