Founding ONOS Board of Directors Comprised of Industry Leaders from Tier 1 Service Providers and Vendors

MENLO PARK, Calif., April 14, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- ON.Lab today announced the founding members of the ONOS Project's Board of Directors. ONOS' Board comprises representatives from Tier 1 service providers AT&T, NTT Communications, SK Telecom and leading vendors including Ciena, Cisco, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Huawei, Intel, and NEC.

ONOS is the SDN network operating system for service providers architected for performance, high availability, scale-out and well-defined northbound and southbound abstractions and interfaces. ONOS was open-sourced and made publicly available for download on Dec. 5, 2014. ONOS has been well received by the community, experiencing rapid adoption and growth in contributions to codebase and feature set since its release.

ONOS is a technical meritocracy where influence on the direction of the solution is directly proportional to technical contributions. The Board of Directors provides strategic direction, thought and community leadership for ONOS and works in conjunction with the following four teams to deliver on the ONOS mission:

• Technical Steering Team is comprised of active technical contributors and stewards the overall technical direction of ONOS.
• Use Cases and Solutions Team is comprised of service providers and defines use cases, solutions, Proof of Concepts, and drives SDN trials and deployments.
• Roadmap and Releases Team defines the product roadmap, and drives and delivers ONOS releases.
• Community Advocacy Team represents the ONOS community's interests, drives consensus and ensures that community members are able to contribute and provide feedback and that their contributions are recognized and valued.

ON.Lab plays the role of benevolent and mostly invisible steward and helps the ONOS Project stay focused on delivering value to the community.

"Having a board comprised of the networking industry's seasoned visionary leaders ensures that ONOS stays on track in delivering a carrier-grade platform with the requisite scalability, high availability and performance along with a set of compelling service provider-focused use cases and solutions," said Guru Parulkar, Executive Director at ON.Lab and Chair of ONOS' Board. "The board also provides strategic direction towards building a vibrant open source community around ONOS that can grow and sustain efforts to help service providers transform their infrastructure and deliver real value to the end-users."

Founding ONOS Board Members are identified by their quotes below:

AT&T 
"AT&T is innovating to bring new applications and infrastructures to market for services our customers need to succeed," said Al Blackburn, Vice President of Domain 2.0 architecture and planning at AT&T. "Open source allows developers to build a rich set of new features and applications quickly and create community to rapidly reshape the network and services landscape."

NTT Communications
"We've been involved with SDN efforts from the start and have been testing and deploying SDN and OpenFlow on our networks for about three years now," said Yukio Ito, Senior Vice President and Board Member, NTT Communications. "ONOS is uniquely focused on service provider use cases that deliver on the promise of true SDN benefits to enable programmability and automation throughout the WAN. Providing single pane of glass network management will allow our customers to rapidly provision and augment resources for complex architectures to support mission critical applications, and we look forward to developing ONOS further into cloud and enterprise applications to provide value to our customers."

Ito added, "Working with ONOS' Board we look forward to exploring new technological approaches that will deliver reduced capex and opex for service providers by giving them a centralized view of the network using commercial off the shelf, COTS, equipment."

SK Telecom
"With an already thriving open source mobile OS environment coming from Android and iOS' active development community, we are constantly seeing the invention of new applications and use cases that challenge our business units to pioneer new service models for this dynamic market," said Alex Jinsung Choi, CTO and Executive Vice President at SK Telecom. "Being on the ONOS Board allows us to collaborate directly with solutions vendors and the developers in the open source community to meet the evolving needs of our customers by delivering the programmability and service agility we require of our network."

Ciena
"Ciena is a sponsor of ON.Lab and a founding member of the ONOS Project and over the years has worked closely with ON.Lab leadership on various projects," said Francois Locoh-Donou, Senior Vice President of Global Products Group at Ciena. "The interest and participation of key network operators like AT&T and NTT Communications, the particular focus on the wide area networks that power service providers, and the community of expertise involved – including some of the inventors and early visionaries in the SDN field – was irresistible to us."

Cisco
"Disruption is important as the networking industry undergoes tremendous change. Openness is a critical factor in pulling the community together to bring innovative solutions to fruition," said David Ward, CTO of Engineering and Chief Architect at Cisco. "We need to push the industry forward and at the heart of supporting open source industry initiatives is the code. Service providers, developers and end users will benefit from the entire ecosystem coming together to drive open source innovation."

Ericsson
Anita Frisell, Vice President, Head of Architecture and Technology for Development in Network Analytics and Control at Ericsson says: "The direct participation of and engagement with major Tier 1 service providers in this project will make sure that the use cases that we focus on are in line with their needs, priorities and timelines. Ericsson has been an ONOS partner since the start of the project. The decision to join the board of ONOS and play a leading role in shaping the future of the project reflects Ericsson's desire to ensure that the industry benefits from all the collaborative developments in these open source communities."

Fujitsu Communications
"It's been very gratifying to work with ON.Lab's community and seeing the first iteration of ONOS deliver carrier grade use cases for SDN style control of converged packet-optical networks," said Masayuki Seno, Senior Vice President, Head of Network Integration Business Unit, Fujitsu. "The group's commitment to open standards ensures interoperability to deliver the proven performance required to provide efficiencies to service providers while enabling new service agility in the WAN. ONOS' highly available, scalable control capabilities coupled with its rich northbound abstractions have brought everyone much closer to achieving our common goal—to provide increased network programmability to support a new era of dynamic services."

Huawei
"As the mainstream for future network architectures, SDN will unleash the full potential of infrastructures to prepare operator networks for innovative services and efficiency improvement," said Mr. Zha Jun, President of Fixed Network Product Line at Huawei. "Huawei, as a founding member of ONOS, will proactively participate in the understanding of SDN's application scenarios and partner with other ONOS members to improve ONOS's capability for commercial deployments in the operator field and ensure the sound development of the SDN industry."

Intel
"Intel has been a staunch proponent for the development of open source SDN software and architectures that facilitate management and orchestration capabilities for Network Functions as-a-Service use cases and NFV in general," said Intel's Pranav Mehta, Sr. Research Scientist at Intel Labs.

NEC
"As one of the founding members of ON.Lab, it is a great pleasure to see our collective efforts come to fruition with the launch of ONOS and its rapid uptake by, and contributions from, the developer and DevOps communities," said Shunichiro Tejima, Executive Vice President, NEC Corporation. "Bringing together the community of service providers, vendors, developers and end users ensures the ongoing success of SDN among all parties involved in accelerating adoption of a simple solution for complex, high-performance network architectures. ONOS' successful iterations will be a boon to the entire SDN ecosystem and networking industry, and will ensure the successful development of innovative service provider as well as enterprise and other end-user applications."

To download, contribute to or deploy ONOS, and learn about or join the ONOS partnership, visit www.onosproject.org. For further information on ON.Lab, visit http://onlab.us/ or email [email protected].

About ONOS and ON.Lab
ONOS is a SDN networking operating system for Service Provider networks architected for high performance, scale and availability. ONOS' ecosystem comprises of ON.Lab and organizations that are funding and contributing to the ONOS initiative. These include AT&T, NTT Communications, SK Telecom, Ciena, Cisco, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Huawei, Intel and NEC; members who are collaborating and contributing to ONOS include ONF, Infoblox, SRI, Internet2, Happiest Minds, KISTI, KAIST, Kreonet, CNIT, Black Duck, Create-Net and the broader ONOS community. Learn how you can get involved with ONOS at onosproject.org.

Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab) is a non-profit organization founded by SDN inventors and leaders from Stanford University and UC Berkeley to foster an open source community for developing tools and platforms to realize the full potential of SDN. ON.Lab brings innovative ideas from leading edge research and delivers high quality open source platforms on which members of its ecosystem and the industry can build real products and solutions. For further information on ON.Lab, visit http://onlab.us/.

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ON.Lab & ONOS Contact
Ram Appalaraju, Strategic Advisor for ON.Lab, [email protected]

SOURCE ON.Lab

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