ONF counts 100 members backing its SDN advocacy effort

The nonprofit Open Networking Foundation (ONF) passed the 100-member milestone in its bid to promote software-defined networking (SDN) technology and its OpenFlow protocol.

The group's newest members are consultancy TorreyPoint, optical transport vendor Coriant and cloud-services provider Virtela. Other ONF members consist of chip companies, system vendors, computer companies, software companies, testing companies, training companies, telecom operators, data-center operators and a variety of enterprises.

Through ONF, companies have access to all OpenFlow-related intellectual property royalty-free and can participate in interoperability events such as PlugFest as well as technical and educational working groups.

"In the past two years since our public launch, we have seen a significant increase in OpenFlow based switches, controllers, and applications, and real-world deployments of the technology," said Dan Pitt, ONF executive director.

"SDN is the most disruptive technology since TCP/IP, and must be standardized in order to succeed. ONF provides a standards body to drive interoperability and innovation in the SDN space, fostering a collaborative environment," said Doug Marschke, CTO of TorreyPoint.

ONF was launched in 2011 by Deutsche Telekom, Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Verizon (NYSE:VZ) and Yahoo.

For more:
- see this ONF release

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