Open Network Featured Article

Momentum (News - Alert) is powerful thing. In sports, momentum can mean the difference in winning the big game. In the enterprise, momentum can deliver the next sale or building a market presence. The Open Network Automation (News - Alert) Platform (ONAP) is a well known entity tasked with empowering end users with the ability to automate, design, orchestrate and manage services and virtual functions, and is currently riding a wave of membership momentum.

ONAP announced six new members to the project this week, including: Equinix, FiberHome, Kaloom, Netsia, Openet (News - Alert) and ZTEsoft. The newly minted members join over 50 global service providers in the mission to develop a vendor neutral automation platform for services, infrastructure and the network to aid service providers, enterprises and cloud providers.

"Open source networking has achieved significant market growth because it allows organizations of all sizes to quickly and innovatively bring new products and services to market using the largest shared technology investment," said Arpit Joshipura, General Manager of Networking & Orchestration, The Linux Foundation (News - Alert). "At the same time, the industry understands that if we are to create the networks needed to support 5G and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), there must be global harmonization of development efforts. ONAP members share a commitment to uniting work and collaboratively transforming the service delivery lifecycle."

The beauty in this type of project is collaboration. Coming as a result of the collaborative effort is the consolidation of resources, and in taking this approach ONAP is able to deliver on its goal of open standards via unified architecture. In addition to the excitement that is the end product, the ONAP membership is capable of development faster than any individual entity.

Momentum certainly won’t last forever, but currently it is a key component in ONAP’s growing membership. Brace yourself a software-defined, open future is close. Is your network ready?