Open Network Featured Article

Software Defined Networking is surging currently. Curiosity in this burgeoning technology is resulting in high levels of development, pushing the line of what is capable in today’s networking environment. As a result of this growing interest and expanding adoption two pioneers in this arena joined forces to accelerate the SDN push.

This week, ON.Lab and The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) announced an agreement to merge. The two not-for-profits will be combined under the ONF name, which is expected to be official by late next year.

“Agreeing to combine the two organizations is a win for everybody. ONF’s standards work will benefit from ON.Lab’s much larger software development team, allowing ONF to derive useful standards from deployed open source software,” said Google’s (News - Alert) Urs Hölzle, current chairman of the ONF Board.

According to recent research from Allied Market Research, the SDN market is projected to reach a valuation of nearly $133 billion by 2022. The newly formed entity will blow the trumpet and lead the charge into the next generation of SDN adoption and innovation.

“Over the last few years, it has become clear that SDN standards and open source software development must come together. Open source is critical to SDN deployment,” noted ON (News - Alert).Lab Founder and Executive Director Guru Parulka.

Once finalized, the new ONF will merge membership, budget, operations as well as employees – which includes ON.Lab’s ecosystem of 17 partners and more than 70 companies as well as the ONF’s 110 member companies.

Parulka continued to explain, “With the combination of ONF and ON.Lab, we are shaping the future of networking by bringing standards and open source efforts under a single umbrella. 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.”

SDN is no passing fad, as it is quickly becoming embedded in the fabric of all things technology. Incubators of innovation and standards like ON.Labs and ONF are offering a spring board for a big splash in the space.

To learn more about the announcement, ON.Labs has provided an FAQ forum.