Vodafone Joins ONAP's Lineup

The Linux Foundation's ONAP project added a heavyweight to its lineup card with the addition of Vodafone.

Vodafone Group plc (NYSE: VOD), which has close to 444 million customers worldwide, joined Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) as a platinum member on Monday. With the addition of Vodafone, 18 service providers and vendors have now signed on as platinum members for ONAP, including Amdocs, AT&T, Bell, China Mobile, China Telecom, Cisco, Ericsson, GigaSpaces, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Jio, Nokia, Orange, Tech Mahindra, VMware and ZTE.

All told, the membership of ONAP now accounts for 55% of the global subscribers. In April, ONAP's members served 38% of the global wireless customers. The ONAP community currently stands at 1,000 developers and 45 members. (See ONAP Takes Center Stage at ONS.)

“With Vodafone and so many other global telecom companies investing in ONAP so early on, the project is incredibly well positioned to swiftly deliver a common platform for rapidly designing, implementing and managing differentiated services,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager of the Linux Foundation, in a prepared statement.

Vodafone was an early adopter of SDN/NFV, cloud and virtualization, which will aid ONAP in its mission to deliver a neutral automation platform for network, infrastructure and services across service providers, cloud providers and enterprises while still using existing technology investments.

"We are looking forward to joining and collaborating with the ONAP community,” said Fran Heeran, group head of network virtualization at Vodafone and now a member of ONAP's governing board. "Vodafone’s membership demonstrates the company’s commitment to open platforms and open source in helping to drive innovation and transformation across the telecommunication industry, especially in the areas of SDN and NFV."

— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation