ONF and ON.Lab claim the OIP initiative to bolster open source SDN, NFV and cloud efforts being hampered by open source-based proprietary work.
Tapping into an ongoing merger arrangement with Open Networking Lab, the Open Networking Foundation recently unveiled its Open Innovation Pipeline targeted at counteracting the move by vendors using open source platforms to build proprietary solutions.
ONF said the initiative will tap into network virtualization work behind software-defined networking, network functions virtualization and cloud technologies, with those contributing work into the OIP being able to benefit from inclusion into ON.Lab’s Open Network Operating System project and central office rearchitected as a data center platform, and vendors gaining access to operator deployments.
“Now that the SDN movement, first initiated by the ONF, has successfully set in motion the disaggregation of networking devices and control software and fostered the emergence of a broad range open source platforms, the industry needs a unifying effort to build solutions out of the numerous disaggregated components,” ONF noted in a statement. “A trend has emerged where vendors leverage open source to build closed proprietary solutions, providing only marginal benefit to the broader ecosystem. The ONF’s Open Innovation Pipeline in intended to counteract this trend by offering greater returns to members who participate in the ONF’s collaborative process.”
ONF also said it plans to promote interoperability with “diverse components” of the open source ecosystem by using a software defined standards approach to developing interoperability application program interfaces and data models.
“Open source is moving much more quickly than the traditional standards process, and as such we are recrafting the ONF’s mission around standards to include a focus on deriving interoperability APIs and data model from open source in order to promote interoperability,” explained Timon Sloane, VP of standards and membership at ONF. “It is very important to us that all the pieces of this new ecosystem can play well together and we see this expanded focus as central to enabling the crafting of solutions from the disaggregated components now taking shape across the industry.”
ONF and ON.Lab announced their merger plans last October, with the new entity set to run under the ONF name and be headed by Guru Parulkar, ON.Lab founder and executive director. The organizations noted the legal combination is not expected until late 2017, with both entities maintaining “the integrity of both organizations and separate, but closely affiliated operations” focused on SDN and open source platforms until that time.
The move came one month after ONF lost its long-standing executive director Dan Pitt, who had headed the organization since its founding in 2011 by a handful of technology and telecom heavyweights, including Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Verizon Communications and Yahoo.
The combined efforts of ON.Lab and ONF are set to include operations, membership, budget and employees. ONF counts 110 member companies, while ON.Lab states its ecosystem includes more than 70 companies and 17 partners.
“We see a lot of value in combining the best of ONF and ON.Lab,” noted Andre Fuetsch, president of AT&T Labs, CTO at AT&T and ONF board member, at the time of the merger announcement. “To continue driving adoption of SDN, we need both high-quality open source software for the necessary but nondifferentiating infrastructure as well as open standards and APIs. This will allow us to quickly create and deploy innovative new services above and to control standard hardware below. A unified organization enables software to inform new standards and help drive much faster adoption of SDN.”
Until the merger is completed, ONF is being governed by a board of directors composed of one delegate elected by its membership and additional delegates from AT&T, Google and NTT Communications. SK Telecom also includes a delegate to represent the ONOS projects CORD platform and Verizon has a board seat in representation of ONOS. Other members include ONF co-founder Nick McKeown, current ONF board member Jennifer Rexford and Parulkar.
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