The Linux Foundation bolstered its telecom ranks with AT&T joining the organization as its twelfth “platinum” member on the heels of ECOMP move.
The Linux Foundation announced AT&T has joined the open source organization as a “platinum” member, with a senior AT&T executive joining the organization’s board of directors.
AT&T joins fellow companies Cisco Systems, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC, Oracle, Qualcomm and Samsung on the penthouse suite of membership levels at The Linux Foundation. Microsoft joined the organization late last year in a bit of a coup seeing as Microsoft’s past history of basing platforms on proprietary software seemed counter to what The Linux Foundation was attempting to do.
As part of the AT&T move, Chris Rice, SVP at AT&T Labs, joins the organization’s board of directors and was recently named chairman of its Open Network Automation Platform.
“Open source is crucial to AT&T’s software transformation,” said Rice, in a statement. “So, it was a natural decision for us to join The Linux Foundation. [Software-defined networking] is helping us meet performance, capital spending and efficiency goals and we expect continued benefits. But more so, we recognize that the open source community accelerates innovation. We’re excited to work with The Linux Foundation and its members to promote a globally accepted platform for SDN and [network functions virtualization] technologies.”
AT&T earlier this year moved on its plans to migrate its enhanced control, orchestration, management and policy platform into the open source community through The Linux Foundation. Stated goals of moving ECOMP into the open source community include delivering the capabilities for the design, creation, orchestration, monitoring and lifecycle management of virtual network functions in a SDN environment.
The Linux Foundation a few weeks later announced plans to merge open source ECOMP with its Open Orchestrator Project to form the ONAP Project. The move is said to harmonize open source ECOMP and Open-O under a single framework for “real-time, policy driven software automation of virtual network functions that will enable software, network, IT and cloud providers and developers to rapidly create new services.”
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