It's not quite Hades freezing over, or a Christmas miracle, but Cisco, Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia announced today that they've teamed up on an NFV interoperability testing initiative.
Communications service providers have been clamoring for open source groups and vendors to solve the interoperability challenges that have been hampering network virtualization. On that note, Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC), Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. and Nokia Corp. (NYSE: NOK) signed off on a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to create the NFV Interoperability Testing Initiative (NFV-ITI,) which will support the Open Platform for NFV Project Inc. (OPNFV) project. The game plan includes NFV-ITI working closely with the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) NFV Industry Specification Group.
Instead of dealing with closed, proprietary solutions and systems, communications service providers (CSPs) want to move towards open APIs, cloud-native operations and plug and play solutions in order to support their virtualization initiatives, but those efforts have been largely hamstrung to date due to the different implementations by vendors.
While the vendors that signed the pact are fierce competitors, it appears that they've come to terms with working together to move the NFV ball farther down the field.
The primary objective of NFV-ITI will be to "promote competition and create industry alignment on generic principles for NFV interoperability testing and support for specific customer situations," according to the press release.
It will also address NFV multi-vendor interoperability challenges for communication service providers, which would allow them to optimize NFV deployment and integration costs while reducing the time to market for new services. The vendors also proclaimed that NFV-ITI wouldn't duplicate the testing of other industry organizations such as the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) NFV Testing WG, OPNFV testing projects, Network Vendor Interoperability Testing (NVIOT) testing and The New IP Agency interoperability testing.
Instead, NFV-ITI will draw a bead on testing interoperability configurations of commercial NFV solutions that are already in use by CSPs. From there, it will recommend generic principles, including interoperability test cases, test criteria, processes, methods, guidelines, templates and testing tools. It will also leverage the best practices from all the existing interoperability testing activities in the industry.
— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation