The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) and Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab) announced plans to merge.
The combined organization, which will operate under the ONF name, will be led by ON.Lab Founder and Executive Director, Guru Parulkar. It 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.
“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,” said Parulkar. “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. This emphasis on open source, supported by ON.Lab’s successful software development, will guide ONF’s ongoing standards work, including updates to OpenFlow.”
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 interim board will also include ONF Co-Founder Nick McKeown; current ONF board member and Princeton University Professor, Dr. Jennifer Rexford; and Dr. Guru Parulkar.
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.
