Top Carriers and Vendors Back Groundbreaking Global Initiative Uniting Two Major Networking and Orchestration Projects

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 23, 2017 — (PRNewswire) —  The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration, today announced the merger of open source ECOMP and Open Orchestrator Project (OPEN-O) to create the new Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) Project. ONAP will allow end users to automate, design, orchestrate, and manage services and virtual functions.

AT&T, China Mobile and the world's leading operators are driving ONAP with a diverse group of founding members. Founding Platinum members include Amdocs, AT&T, Bell Canada, China Mobile, China Telecom, Cisco, Ericsson, GigaSpaces, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Nokia, Orange, Tech Mahindra, VMware and ZTE. Silver members of ONAP are ARM, BOCO Inter-Telecom, Canonical, China Unicom, Cloudbase Solutions, Metaswitch and Raisecom.

"By combining two of the largest open source networking initiatives, the community is able to take advantage of the best architectural components of both projects," said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of The Linux Foundation. "We're excited to see the industry coalesce around ONAP with this unprecedented merger. Such a broad effort and investment will expedite our vision to deliver an open platform for network automation."

Alignment of the two projects creates a harmonized and comprehensive framework for real-time, policy-driven software automation of virtual network functions that will enable software, network, IT and cloud providers and developers to rapidly create new services. By consolidating member resources, ONAP is well positioned to deliver a unified architecture and implementation, with an open standards upstream focus, faster than any one project could on its own.

The Linux Foundation will establish a governance and membership structure for ONAP to nurture a vibrant technical community. A Governing Board will guide business decisions, marketing and ensure alignment between the technical communities and members. The technical steering committee will provide leadership on the code merge and guide the technical direction of ONAP.

Many ONAP members and developers working to advance this sophisticated automation platform will be participating in the upcoming Mobile World Congress, to be held February 27-March 2 in Barcelona, and Open Networking Summit (ONS), to be held April 3-6 in Santa Clara, CA.

Industry Support for ONAP:

Amdocs
"The merging of open source ECOMP and OPEN-O will create the de facto industry standard for NFV/SDN automation and accelerate industry adoption by service providers and the vendor ecosystem. Open source ECOMP brings a holistic approach based on production-proven software--the foundation upon which ONAP is being developed. As co-creator of ECOMP along with AT&T, we bring core platform expertise and a unique end-to-end perspective that enables the ONAP project to deliver tangible value to global service providers and provide innovative virtual services faster."

-- Anthony Goonetilleke, Group President, Amdocs Technology

AT&T
"AT&T is excited to be working with a larger team on the future, open source network operating system for SDN automation. Creating a combined team of the initial open source ECOMP members with existing OPEN-O members bodes well for the project's success. I want to thank the people at CMCC and Huawei, along with Jim Zemlin and Arpit Joshipura at The Linux Foundation who worked so hard with us to make this happen. We expect more consolidation in this space, and we expect many more service providers and other technology leaders to join us in this important work, which benefits the entire industry."

--Chris Rice, SVP of Domain 2.0 Architecture and Design at AT&T

Bell Canada
"Bell Canada believes broader industry coordination and the creation of ONAP is the fastest path to development of a winning orchestration platform. We are excited to see the industry unifying around open source and a new network approach that is faster, more efficient and ultimately more responsive to the needs of businesses and consumers."

--Petri Lyytikainen, VP Network Strategy, Services and Management at Bell Canada

China Mobile
"It is well accepted that SDN/NFV plays a key role to the carrier transformation, where automation of management and orchestration is one of the most critical enablers. Hence China Mobile has long been investing resources in the orchestrator development, and launched OPEN-O open source project with partners. In order to cohere efforts, to avoid fragmentation, and to accelerate the transformation of operators, China Mobile, AT&T and The Linux Foundation, finally reached consensus after several rounds of discussion. We are pleased to embrace the birth of the new project ONAP. It is our firm belief that, as the world's two largest telecom operators, the close collaboration in ONAP between China Mobile and AT&T, will accelerate the carrier network evolution with a strong impact on the industry globally. We sincerely hope that more industry partners would join hands with us in ONAP to promote industrial prosperity."

--Madam Yang Zhiqiang, Deputy General Manager, China Mobile Research Institute

China Telecom
"China Telecom is now undertaking CTNet2025 network transformation, aiming to build up a concise, agile, open and integrated network. This new combined ONAP platform will enable the full lifecycle management of cloud-centric, software-controlled networks, and consequently expedite the design of a new network operation system, which is considered to play a critical role in our plan. As a founding member of ONAP, China Telecom will continuously work together with other operators and partners in the community to further promote technological innovation. We have great confidence the in prosperity of the future ecosystem."

--Ms. Shaoai Shen, Deputy General Manager, Technology Department of China Telecom

Cisco
"The movement up-stack in Open Source Networking is a fantastic path towards a full umbrella architecture for Service Providers and Enterprises. ONAP is a great opportunity for the industry to work together towards the goal of a new operational model that includes network-wide orchestration and automation. This project along with other projects like ODL, FD.io, OPNFV and PNDA that we have invested heavily, have proven the value of open innovation and created a developer community around networking. We are very excited to be working with our colleagues and the developer community and enabling ONAP."

--David Ward, CTO of Engineering and Chief Architect at Cisco Systems

Ericsson
"Ericsson promotes and leads development of open source ecosystems for next generation technologies, accelerating adoption and industry alignment in key areas of Ericsson's 5G vision. Ericsson welcomes open source initiatives for SDN, NFV and Cloud and has been actively driving industry alignments through various open source activities, for example OPNFV, to benefit customers and partners. Management and Orchestration provides a natural extension of the OPNFV and virtualization ecosystem creating a platform for innovation and collaboration. Through our participation in ONAP, Ericsson will continue to take the lead in areas of network automation, service enablement, and analytics to help our customers to succeed in their digital transformations."

--Ulf Ewaldsson, SVP, CSO & CTO, Head of Group Function Strategy and Technology, Ericsson Group

GigaSpaces
"In creating ONAP, The Linux Foundation—supported by AT&T and China Mobile—have fused two key open networking projects, marking a tectonic industry shift. Cloudify is a founding member of OPEN-O, and Project ARIA is the common TOSCA partner in OPEN-O. ONAP is a major step toward delivering an interoperable foundation upon which cloud-native applications and network functions operate. This is critical, as it allows more rapid innovation further up the stack and at scale, which is the next frontier in cloud services delivery. Cloudify is committed to ONAP, continuing our work on networks powered by open code, standards and orchestration."

--Nati Shalom, Founder and CTO, GigaSpaces

Huawei
"The consolidation of OPEN-O and open source ECOMP under a unified ONAP represents a key milestone in our telecom industry towards building a strong open ecosystem to empower the accelerated network cloud transformation. The model-driven end-to-end architectural framework of ONAP provides a great foundation for future active community engagement across service providers and system vendors based on an agile, collaborative and open source development model. It will enable operators to rapidly design and launch the on-demand provisioning of new services and realize more efficient closed-loop operations. Furthermore, it would accelerate the digital transformation of operators aiming to bring ROADS (Real-time, On-demand, All-online, DIY and Social) experience for end users."