Open Network Featured Article

Open source platforms are established by individuals and organizations in public and private sectors to bring openness and innovation for the public good. The goal is generally to develop technologies in which everyone can use them freely by establishing a standard industry players can adopt to remove the complexities in information and communications technologies. The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) and Open Networking Lab (ON (News - Alert).Lab) have those very same goals, and they have come together to unveil Open Innovation Pipeline (OIP) to respond to the growing numbers of vendors that are using open source platforms to build proprietary solutions.

In a statement regarding this issue, ONF said, "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."

This collaboration comes after the two organizations announced in October of last year to merge and become a single entity under the Open Networking Foundation name. Some of the leading networking equipment vendors, semiconductor, computer and software companies as well as telecom service providers, hyper scale data-center operators, enterprise users and 24 start-up companies in software defined networking are now members.

The ONF wants organizations to tap into the benefits of the open source platform, and vendors to gain access to operator deployments and be able to benefit from inclusion into ON.Lab’s Open Network Operating System project and central office re-architected as a data center platform.

By 2022 the SDN market is expected to reach $132.9 billion, according to Allied Market Research. And this undoubtedly will drive some vendors to capitalize on the benefits of the developments ON.Lab’s Open Network Operating System project by creating their own propriety solutions, which go against the very foundational principles of open source solutions.

Timon Sloane, VP of standards and membership at ONF, explained it like this, "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."

As for open source, it is much more efficient, which explains the rapid growth and adoption of SDN and NFV by industry players. Sloane added, "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."

To continue this interoperability, the ONF said it is going to be using software defined standards approach to developing interoperability application program interfaces and data models with “diverse components” of the open source ecosystem.