This week's Open Networking Summit in San Jose will be chock-full of new technology tracks, tutorials and keynotes from some of the biggest movers and shakers in the telecom industry.
Among all of the technology-related news and networking, this year's conference also features a new level of cooperation among the open source communities and standards bodies, according to the Linux Foundation's Arpit Joshipura.
ONS 2019 kicks off on Wednesday in the San Jose McEnery Convention Center with tutorials in the morning followed by keynote addresses starting at 1 p.m. PDT.
"There are lots of tutorials for those who want to learn about technologies from a training perspective," said Joshipura, general manager for networking, in an interview with FierceTelecom. "I'm going to open the show, and I'm pretty much talking about the journey of where we are today in terms of open networking and how far we have come.
"I'm covering the whole collaboration aspect of open source and open networking in terms of carriers, vendors and system integrators all coming together to create this huge automation layer or huge networking layer that is critical for 5G, IoT and things like that."
Joshipura will be followed on the keynote podium by China Mobile's Junlan Feng, general manager of the AI and Intelligent Operation R&D Center and chief scientist, who will speak about how the open source community can help with the integration and innovation of AI academic results and communication network production practices.
The five new tracks for ONS 2019 are: "Carrier and Cloud Developer" which is for attendees interested in DevOps; "Cloud Native Networking" for service provider and enterprise attendees; "Enterprise IT and Operations; "The New Edge"; and "World of Open Innovation and Impact to Networking."
The edge track looks to be one of the hot topics at this week's conference. In January, the Linux Foundation launched LF Edge, which is an umbrella organization to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud or operating system.
LF Edge includes Akraino Edge Stack, EdgeX Foundry and Open Glossary of Edge Computing, all of which were formerly stand-alone projects at The Linux Foundation. A spokeswoman for the Linux Foundation said there would be several press releases issued around ONS this week, including one on LF Edge.
"There's an entire track all three days dedicated just to edge topics," Joshipura said. "The 'World of Open Innovation and Impact to Networking' track is about what's on the horizon, what's cool and some of the new things we should be looking out for. The 'Cloud-Native Networking' track will discuss mesh, CNFs (cloud-native functions), CNIs (cloud-native interfaces) and things like that.
"The Enterprise IT track includes operations and businesses for the enterprise side. Mostly, we get end users, like Target and all of those guys, to come and talk about what they have learned, and what they need from networking. The new Carrier and Cloud Developer track will look at implementations and architectures."
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For the first time at a Linux Foundation event in North America, ONS will also have an "Unconference Track" and meeting space for projects in the LF Networking initiative for topic discussions and small-team breakouts.
"People love it because this gives them ad hoc conference participation," Joshipura said. "We started the 'Unconference' track off in Europe and it has been very popular."
Joshipura highlighted Andre Fuetsch's keynote address on Thursday. Fuetsch is president of AT&T Labs and chief technology officer at AT&T.
"He always does a fantastic job of leading the charter on where things need to go," Joshipura said.
Other keynotes Thursday morning will include Ericsson's Anders Rosengren and KPMG Canada's Armughan Ahmad.
Joshipura said he was particularly excited for Friday's morning's open source and open standards keynote panel. Panelists slated to participate include Dan Pitt from MEF, Axel Clauberg, Deutsche Telekom/TIP, Phil Robb, Linux Foundation, Bill Carter, Open Compute Project, Pierre Gauthier, TM Forum, Alla Goldner, 3GGP ETSI, Amdocs, Pierre Lynch and ETSI/Ixia.
Service providers have been frustrated about the number of open source communities and standards bodies while vendors have been faced with picking which projects they want to support. Joshipura said those issues have been largely ironed out, which is reflected in the keynote panel.
"This is the first time we will have pretty much everybody who is working with us, who is collaborative, on the same stage," Joshipura said. "The topic is how is open source and open standards are collaborating, when three or four years ago some of them were fighting with each other. "