Comcast, Fujitsu and Samsung join ONAP project, doubles members in first 6 months

Comcast, Fujitsu, and Samsung are among a new group of companies to join the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) Project, reflecting rapid growth in less than six months after the initiative was launched into the open source community.

Other companies include Infosys and Netcracker Technology.

ONAP has doubled its roster of members, community participants and projects to more over 900 contributors, 50 members and 30 projects.

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The addition of Comcast and major Japanese and Korean companies, show how ONAP will help service providers and vendor automate networks with SDN/NFV.

"Our growth in the past few months alone proves telecommunications, cable/cloud operators and solution providers believe there is a clear need for a common platform for rapidly designing, implementing and managing differentiated services with meaningful cost savings,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, networking at The Linux Foundation, in a release.

Progress with ONAP continues to ramp with its first release, Amsterdam, set to be released later this year. ONAP said that Amsterdam will be the first release to integrate the original OPEN-O and ECOMP code bases into a common, powerful orchestration platform.

In order to move Amsterdam forward, the technical community met this week and plans to convene outside of Paris in late September.

What’s more, the ONAP community has banded together to establish a number of projects and technologies essential to virtual network functions (VNF) orchestration that combine key features from both the OPEN-O and ECOMP platforms. This includes a collection of tools and guidelines that are designed to help vendors create, integrate and validate their VNFs with ONAP. As part of this work, ONAP also announces the acceptance of ICE.

Developed at the AT&T Foundry in Palo Alto, California, ICE is an incubation and validation platform for VNF's that the TSC recently made a part of ONAP. Now known as the VNF Validation Program (ICE) Project, it includes a defined validation process and scripts that will form the basis of the certification and self-test programs for ONAP.

ICE, along with the VNF Requirements Project and the VNF SDK Project that draw on code from OPEN-O and ECOMP, will define how VNFs can obtain an ONAP Compatible Label. Additional key areas of integration include service orchestration, deployment and monitoring of VNFs along with closed loop automation.

The TSC has also approved several uses cases required for carrier networks of the future, including Residential Broadband vCPE, vFW/vDNS and VoLTE.