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ONF & ON.Lab to Merge to Accelerate Adoption of SDN

ONF & ON.Lab to Merge to Accelerate Adoption of SDN Image Credit: ONF/On.lab

The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) and Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab), Wednesday announced an agreement to become a single organization under the ONF name. Joint operations will begin immediately, and will be led by ON.Lab Founder and Executive Director, Guru Parulkar. ONF will maintain its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., where both ONF and ON.Lab are already co-located.

Under this new paradigm, the organizations will bring together the operations, membership, budget and employees of both organizations, including ONF’s 110 member companies and ON.Lab’s ecosystem of more than 70 companies and 17 partners. 

ONF will be governed by an interim board of directors through the end of 2017. This board will be comprised of one delegate elected by the ONF membership and additional delegates from AT&T, Google, and NTT Communications. SK Telecom will represent CORD on this interim board and Verizon will represent ONOS. 

The union of ONF and ON.Lab will offer increased benefits to members of both organizations without any changes in existing membership fees. Members will benefit from the development of industry standards that will now follow successful open source trials in production environments, critical to real-world deployment by service providers, network operators and any startup or vendor that is looking to accelerate SDN adoption.

ONF will continue advancing ONOS, the software-defined networking (SDN) OS, and the Central Office Re-architected as a Data Center (CORD) open source projects, which are led by ON.Lab and The Linux Foundation. The organization will also work with other open source projects such as OpenDaylight and the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) to ensure that future ONF standards, including ongoing updates to OpenFlow, are derived from a consensus among these open source developer communities.

Guru Parulkar, ON.Lab Founder & Executive Director
This will build real synergy between the two – letting open source development and deployment guide standards development. We believe that standards based on widely adopted open source projects such as ODL, ONOS®, OPNFV, and CORD can be more widely and easily implemented within the industry. 

Andre Fuetsch, ONF Board member and President of AT&T Labs and Chief Technology Officer of AT&T
To continue driving adoption of SDN, we need both high-quality open source software for the necessary but non-differentiating 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. 

Author

Ray is a news editor at The Fast Mode, bringing with him more than 10 years of experience in the wireless industry.

For tips and feedback, email Ray at ray.sharma(at)thefastmode.com, or reach him on LinkedIn @raysharma10, Facebook @1RaySharma

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