By: Becky Bracken

Interoperability: the future depends on it. Interoperability is the new telecom imperative. Interoperability is transforming the industry in terms of accelerating innovation and helping it reach beyond straight communications services. Interoperability increase the pace of invention. It helps you build on the work of others and advance beyond it. It allows collaboration and breeds a general spirit of cooperation and joined resources to tackle a problem.

Led by industry disrupting forces of virtualitization including telco cloud, NFV, SDN and the like, the adoption of open standards including OpenFlow, OpenStack and OpenDaylight, has become the purview of tried and true walled garden purists. Even Cisco is adopting elements of SDN's open standard, OpenFlow. OpenFlow, many believe, is the defining characteristic of SDN and that a solution based on any other standard simply isn't SDN. OpenFlow, with its roots in academia, also has the advantage of being far more thoroughly road tested. OpenFlow also provides a common platform for innovation which, in terms of virtualization, the industry is absolutely ravenous after. Because of the promise of agility, flexibility and efficiency of virtualization, everyone in telecom it seems is gathering their collective heads to make the most of running a network on commodity hardware. Driving the SDN and even broader virtualization ecosystem is reason enough to embrace open standards.

ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute and the Open Networking Foundation announced in March a collaboration to promote the NFV ecosystem by enabling SDN forwarding-plane support.

Downloads

• CES Agenda
• CES Fact Sheet
  

0

Inquiry Form

loading

First Name*: Last Name*: Company*: Title*: Email*:

Message Submit

1

Web Links

• COMET Executive Summit Homepage
• Register to Attend
• Sponsorship & Participation
  

2

About CES 2014

Pipeline continues its legacy of bringing together the world’s leading service providers and technology innovators this fall at The 2014 COMET Executive Summit. This exclusive event gathering Pipeline journalists, Industry Advisory Board (IAB) Members, and key solution providers will be an intimate symposium to shape the editorial direction of Pipeline, gather priceless input from executive-level service provider experts, and create lasting industry relationships.

Pipeline’s IAB is an exclusive group of service provider and analyst executives who have long-term relationships with Pipeline and have played a role in Pipeline programs, editorial direction, and provided content over the last decade. This year, Pipeline opens the doors to provide an opportunity to engage directly with a broad cross section of experts who evaluate, recommend, and purchase communications and entertainment technology (COMET) products and services. Multiple levels of participation provide your company with an exclusive networking opportunity, tailored to your goals and budget.

The COMET Executive Summit will bring together executives from the world’s leading service provider and technology companies, in a flexible format that is filled with unprecedented networking opportunities designed to build relationships that can be carried forward to solve issues facing service providers today. Some of the topics planned for discussion include:

• Networking
• Customer experience management (CEM)
• Big data & analytics
• Exploring cloud offerings
• Enabling new business models
• Delivering and assuring digital services
• Network evolution & virtualization
• Leveraging content
• Network security

For more information, visit
www.pipelinepub.com/info/comet/2014_comet_summit.php

3

"ETSI is focused on addressing the problems that telecommunications networks face today by evolving standard IT virtualization technology to consolidate many network equipment types onto industry standard high volume servers, switches and storage," said Luis Jorge Romero, director-general of ETSI. "This collaboration with ONF allows us to both significantly contribute to the goals of the NFV ISG, and serve as a relevant source for requirements and use cases for the SDN community."

That's not to say there aren't closed alternatives in the virtualization space. VMware is one provider of cloud computing architecture that is competing head-to-head with its open counter, OpenStack.

Open comes of age

For the first time, open standards aren't being relegated to the back of the room, in the shadows, being operated by mavericks looking to break the grip of behemoth companies. No, open standards are something even the bluest of chips are pursuing. HP and NEC announced in March a new open standards agreement. HP and NEC, as a result of their partnership, will increase global delivery of SDN-ready networking solutions and software based on open standards.

"With the most widely deployed SDN-enabled infrastructure, HP is committed to providing customers worldwide with innovative solutions based on open standards," said Bethany Mayer, senior Vice President and general manager, HP Networking. "By aligning our expertise and ensuring interoperability, HP and NEC will continue to lead the market through continual technical advancements and flexible networking infrastructure that empowers customers to protect and grow their current and future investments."