ONOS Project Joins Linux Foundation in Strategic Partnership

Foundation to provide global reach, experience and infrastructure for open source community development to enhance and further grow ONOS’ thriving community

Seattle and Menlo Park, Calif., Oct. 13, 2015 – ONOS’ community and The Linux Foundation today announced a strategic partnership that is expected to have an enormous impact on the future of networking by helping ONOS to realize its full potential as an open source SDN and NFV project for service providers. The new Collaborative Project will advance and bring together the community for ONOS to build open source platforms, solutions and ecosystem for service providers to monetize SDN/NFV, while helping vendors and service providers invent new business models. Working together empowers the ONOS project to leverage best practices in community engagement to grow and nurture a larger community, globally enabling developers and contributors to further accelerate the pace of innovation through feedback and contributions to its open source platforms and solutions.

The partnership will focus on creating disruptive SDN solutions featuring open source software platforms, white boxes, a range of network control and management applications and the ability to rapidly create and deploy innovative services. By becoming a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project, ONOS will leverage the Foundation’s depth of expertise in open source software project governance and community participation, significantly enhancing the project’s capabilities in the crucial strategic area of open source processes and practices.

The ONOS project and platform includes several compelling SDN/NFV solutions for service providers, a global footprint in Research and Education (R&E) networks and a growing community around the globe. Together, ONOS and The Linux Foundation can significantly accelerate the virtuous cycle of developing platforms and use cases (e.g. ONOS, CORD) by enabling solutions that are enriched by community contributions and fed back to further improve and harden the platform.

“Service providers are increasingly adopting open source software to build their networks and today are making open source and collaboration a strategic part of their business and an investment in the future,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation. “The Linux Foundation recognizes the impact the ONOS project can have on service provider networks and will help advance ONOS to achieve its potential. The partnership combines the best of the two organizations’ capabilities in support of a strategic vision to transform service provider infrastructure with open source SDN and NFV.” 

“Now is the perfect time to partner with the Linux Foundation,” said Guru Parulkar, Executive Director and Board Member at ON.Lab/ONOS project. “They bring a number of resources and also provide a measure of trust and sustainability through a well-built brand that delivers extended reach to our collaborative community and accelerates innovation on an even larger scale. ONOS’ services provider, vendor, and research partners welcome the partnership and look forward to the benefits of scale, awareness and sustainability that it will provide.” 

The partnership will help ON.Lab/ONOS transform service providers’ infrastructure for increased monetization by achieving high capex and opex efficiencies and creating new innovative services using the power of open source SDN and NFV. The Linux Foundation will assist ONOS to organize, grow and harness the power of this global community to take ONOS and the solutions enabled by it to the next level of production readiness and drive adoption in production networks. 

The ONOS project has issued four open source releases of ONOS since December 2014 and demonstrated its architecture’s features including scalability, high performance, high availability, modularity and the ability to support OpenFlow as well as NETCONF and other southbound protocols. The project has also demonstrated a number of service provider solutions enabled by ONOS such as CORD (Central Office Re-architected as Data Center), packet-optical convergence, SDN-IP peering, and others.

ON.Lab has a well-established brand name and track record for leading the open source SDN movement and has built solid SDN and NFV software platforms and solutions for service providers, rapidly turning feedback from its community into new features and hardened software. ON.Lab provides a strong core engineering team to shepherd ONOS with focus and purpose, leveraging its deep engagement among service providers and vendors to create solutions that enable new business models. The ONOS platform and solutions have experienced tremendous downloads, adoption and feedback from its community and partnering with the Linux Foundation will accelerate and enhance this success. 

ON.Lab and the ONOS project will continue with their respective boards. ONOS’ mission will remain the same and that is to accelerate the adoption of SDN and NFV in mission critical networks based on open source platforms and solutions. ON.Lab and the ONOS project will continue to operate the way they have in the past except in the area of building, nurturing and harnessing the power of a truly global open source community in partnership with the Linux Foundation.

About the ONOS project
ONOS is the open source 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, China Unicom, 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, NAIM, CNIT, Black Duck, Create-Net, Criterion Networks, ETRI and the broader ONOS community. Learn how you can get involved with ONOS at onosproject.org.

About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux and collaborative software development. Founded in 2000, the organization sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and promotes, protects and advances the Linux operating system and collaborative software development by marshaling the resources of its members and the open source community. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting Collaborative Projects, Linux conferences including LinuxCon, and generating original research and content that advances the understanding of Linux and collaborative software development. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

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