Open Networking Foundation adds Deutsche Telekom as partner member

SDN non-profit Open Networking Foundation (ONF) has announced Deutsche Telekom is on-board as a partner member – the highest membership tier.

DT is the first European CSP to become a partner at the supposedly operator-led consortium, which counts all the major kit vendors among its partners. The ONF has gone a bit quiet since it merged with ON.Lab but it seems to consider the addition of DT to be a strong endorsement of its activities.

“We are thrilled to add a major global European operator as a top-level ONF partner,” said Guru Parulkar, executive director of ONF. “The addition of Deutsche Telekom complements our operator leadership with a valued European perspective, endorsing our vision and providing a notable indicator of our growing impact worldwide. We are deeply appreciative of the commitment DT is making to the ONF, and conversely we are committed to ensuring DT’s success with its ambitious plans for CORD and ONOS.”

“DT has set up the internal Access 4.0 program dedicated to CORD, ONOS and bare-metal hardware,” said Walter Goldenits, CTO at DT. “We believe that these open source projects are at the forefront of a promising movement that enables our industry to manage the data growth in the most efficient way. Our partnership is a commitment to support ONF’s mission and making it a success.”

In the past the ONF has spoken of its desire to limit the influence of the big vendors in the development of SDN. We are now in an era when operators are openly impatient at the rate of progress on virtualization from vendors and increasingly looking to a combination of their own efforts and the open source community to compensate. This move appears to be in keeping with that trend.