Anyone who’s trying to navigate the telecom waters that are open source these days may appreciate that there are entities out there that want to help.
Montreal, Canada-based Inocybe is targeting Tier 2 and 3 wired/wireless service providers globally and enterprises to talk open source. The company has been involved with OpenDaylight since the beginning and is one of its top five contributors, and it wants to help entities that don’t have the type of resources the bigger Tier 1 operators have to devote to open-source projects, of which there are many.
At the end of the day, there’s going to be a balance between open source and proprietary software for running networks, and “what we’re doing … is simplifying how open networking and OpenDaylight is consumed,” for carriers and enterprises, said John Zannos, chief revenue officer at Inocybe.
“We help companies navigate how to use open-source technology,” and Inocybe’s product is a platform designed to simplify the consumption and use of OpenDaylight as the SDN controller, in any architecture, like the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP), he told FierceWirelessTech.
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ONAP is one of the biggest open-source initiatives out there today and is the result of merging AT&T’s ECOMP with China Mobile’s Open O. The ONAP Project just announced the availability of its first platform release, ONAP Amsterdam, which delivers a unified architecture for end-to-end, closed-loop network automation.
Zannos said he is of the belief that ONAP need not be consumed in total; there are pieces of ONAP that can be used in combination with proprietary solutions. The biggest carriers might want to consume ONAP in total or use something completely different, but, being open source, it’s evolving all the time.
“I do think for many people, they may not want to consume all of it,” and efforts are under way to make sure it’s containerized and modular in nature.
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More big telecom operators are getting on board with ONAP, but there are still others that are taking a wait-and-see approach, something smaller operators tend to do. Inocybe is focusing on use cases and presenting just the right amount of open source for a problem or use case, he said.
The company is a proponent of purpose-built open networking and treats open-source software projects such as OpenDaylight as platforms for which product-grade components can be leveraged to solve specific use cases such as traffic engineering, service function chaining and NFVi.