Louisville, Colorado, 15 January 2016

First multi-organization workshop bringing the NFV community together

This week ETSI’s Industry Specification Group for Network Functions Virtualisation (ETSI NFV) convened a ground-breaking industry workshop to align cloud-centric initiatives and network-centric initiatives to ensure successful realization of NFV through automation.

The workshop brought together the leading Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) and Open Source communities in an ‘NFV Village’. The workshop was hosted by CableLabs at their Louisville, Colorado (USA) location.

IP Workshop Group imageThis was a significant and unique event because it is the first time the key standards organizations and open source communities representing a broad and diverse ecosystem have met together with a common purpose to accelerate alignment of their activities in relation to NFV.

Participating organizations included 3GPP, ATIS, Broadband Forum, DMTF, ETSI NFV, IETF, ITU-T SG 15, MEF, OASIS/TOSCA, Open Cloud Connect, ONF, OpenDaylight, OPNFV and TM-Forum. Organizations that did not participate in this workshop are welcome to get involved in this collaboration.

Development of NFV started at ETSI in January 2013 in response to the call to action in the joint-carrier white paper published in October 2012 which introduced the NFV concept. The ETSI NFV community has grown to almost 300 organizations and has delivered key NFV specifications covering requirements, use cases, architectural framework, terminology, management & orchestration, security, performance and reliability. It has also sponsored multi-vendor proofs of concepts to encourage interoperability and growth of an open ecosystem around virtualized network functions.

Different information models and data models are being used amongst SDOs and open source communities resulting in fragmentation and complexity for implementation leading to increased cost and delaying time to market. Alignment of information models brings clarity of definition and drives consistent open APIs that enables efficient evolvable integration across the entire ecosystem including SDN and NFV.

As a result of this workshop there is increased understanding of the challenges and opportunities in the development and adoption of various modelling approaches. And the ongoing collaboration will help to avoid fragmentation in NFV information modelling in order to deliver the services and network automation capabilities which are key benefits of NFV. There was positive feedback from many delegates on the high value of the workshop and the increased awareness of efforts in peer organizations and individual commitment by key experts will significantly boost prospects for industry alignment going forward.

ETSI NFV ISG is pleased to foster increased collaboration among key industry bodies to enable increased automation and reduced operational costs, which service providers look for when initiating work on NFV,” said Steven Wright (AT&T), Chair, ETSI NFV ISG.

The workshop was co-chaired by ETSI NFV Vice-chair Michael Brenner (ClearPath Networks) and Klaus Martiny (Deutsche Telekom), ETSI NFV Network Operator Council Vice-chair. A collaboration plan was agreed to achieve meaningful progress in addressing the challenges and opportunities identified in the workshop by the end of 2016. The first feedback from participating organizations will be in March 2016. The participating organizations will independently progress their work mindful of the collaboration milestones and regular conference calls will take place to monitor progress and when necessary another workshop will be convened to progress alignment.

Don Clarke (CableLabs), Chair of the ETSI NFV Network Operator Council said: “It was a privilege for CableLabs to be able to host this unique event which brought together over 90 of the world’s leading experts on information modelling. A delegate from a leading European operator told me that he sees this multi-SDO collaboration as being the key to unlocking the barriers to NFV adoption. The operator group will continue to be actively involved to facilitate this industry collaboration and to help ensure it delivers what the industry needs for NFV.

About ETSI
ETSI produces globally-applicable standards for Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), including fixed, mobile, radio, aeronautical, broadcast and internet technologies and is officially recognized by the European Union as a European Standards Organization. ETSI is an independent, not-for-profit association whose more than 800 member companies and organizations, drawn from 64 countries, determine its work programme and participate directly in its work.

Contact
Claire Boyer
Tel: +33 (0)4 92 94 43 35
Mob: +33 (0)6 87 60 84 40
Email: claire.boyer@etsi.org
www.etsi.org