Huawei's Chiosi Shares Views on ONAP, MANO & More

Margaret Chiosi, vice president of Open Ecosystems in the US with Huawei, has been at the center of the telecom transformation since day one -- as one of the authors of the original ESTI NFV ISG white paper, and as a strong proponent of open source at AT&T. Today, Chiosi is responsible for putting all that together at Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. , where she is focused on making sure standards and open source are working well together.

In Part 2 of a two-part interview with Telco Transformation at the Open Networking Summit, she shares her views on ONAP, MANO and more. (See Huawei's Chiosi Opens Up About Open Source for Part 1 of the interview.)

TT: The creation of ONAP was a good move for the industry in general and MANO in particular. What are some other areas that can be streamlined among vendors, service providers, open source communities and standards bodies? Would you like to see ONAP and OSM come together, or are they fine working separately but sharing?

Margaret Chiosi: Of course, I would love to see one MANO open source organization and one standards organization. The industry is not growing enough, or has enough resources, to justify more than one. I've always said, 'Divided and we will be conquered.'

There are a lot of controllers right now, including ONAP SDN-C, ONOS, ODL. It's the same in data plane acceleration -- IOVisor, DPDK, ODP -- and virtual overlays; FD.IO, OVS, Contrail, etc.

But I understand that it is important to start out separate with the hopes of allowing creativity and value with different software or hardware perspectives. So again, the challenge is when to continue separate entities, thinking you are creating differentiated value and when you aren't. When you are in your own separate entity, you always think your invention is better, which is NIH [not invented here] syndrome. But if you really try and be objective and rise to the observation deck, would you truly see differentiated value?

TT: We have heard a lot from operators about wanting a common approach to onboarding VNFs. Where do you expect that to come from?

MC: Well I think with ONAP forming this is something both the OPEN-O and ECOMP teams realize is critical. I'm hopeful it will happen in the ONAP community.

TT: We are seeing progress by groups, such as the MEF and TM Forum, working with companies like AT&T, Colt and Orange on open source collaborations. What impact do you think such efforts can have and can they get operators to the revenue-generating services stage faster?

MC: I hope so. I of course know the MEF fairly well given I use to be on the board and helped push some of the building blocks that is creating the Carrier Ethernet 3.0 initiative in MEF. They can help create more use cases and standards in the full automation of NFV.

TT: Can you give us an overview of your responsibilities at Huawei? Are there certain projects or areas that you are focused on?

MC: I'm currently vice president of the Open Ecosystem for Huawei's Network Solutions. So, I have standards and open source. I'm more focused on working the open source part and making sure standards and open source are working well together within Huawei.

The goal is to put open source and standards into our product line and lead in the industry on the components, which we think will be effective for Huawei to enhance our products. We also want to decide on the open ecosystems we need to participate in and to nurture. Basically, we want to make sure we get real business value out of the open ecosystem.

TT: How will software-defined networking (SDN) continue to evolve?

MC: We are past the exuberance stage and going to the trough of reality. I think we will realize that the focus should be on instantiating new services much more quickly and to do this we must fully automate. So, MANO will be the next focus with regard to reality. Until MANO is almost complete we won't we realize the full potential of SDN/NFV.

— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation

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