Intel has purchased the Open Networking Foundation’s (ONF) development team as well as Ananki, an independent venture-backed company that was recently spun out of the ONF to supply open source-based Software-Defined Private 5G as a commercial service, according to the release. The financial details were kept under wraps.
Guru Parulkar, the ONF Executive Director, has joined Intel as Vice President of the Network and Edge Group, reporting to Nick McKeown, the founding ONF board member and Senior Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s Network and Edge Group. In addition, the majority of ONF’s internal development team will join Intel’s workforce.
As it transitions away from code development by an internal team, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), which was founded in 2011 with the mission of transforming networking by championing software-defined networking (SDN), disaggregation, and open source, has released all of its projects to open source with permissive software licences. To that purpose, ONF has made its full portfolio of production-ready platforms open sourced, including solutions for public 5G (SD-Core, SD-RAN), private 5G networks (Aether), software-defined broadband (SEBA/VOLTHA), and P4 programmable networks (SD-Fabric, PINS).
As the ONF transforms into a more traditional open source organisation, Timon Sloane will serve as General Manager, and new Area Governance Boards will be formed to guide the major project areas.
“ONF has made important contributions to the industry with its software-defined development projects, and I am confident that its move to a community-sourced model as part of its next stage of growth will fuel further contributions as the industry and its needs advance,” said Nick McKeown, founding ONF board member and Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Network and Edge Group at Intel. “As a result of ONF’s shift in direction, we are pleased to welcome ONF’s development team to Intel. We look forward to our continued contributions to ONF projects, the ongoing success of ONF-developed platforms, and our active participation in the ONF community.”
“ONF’s journey has been transformational,” said Guru Parulkar, VP Intel NEX and Board Member, ONF. “In collaboration with our partners, our small amazing team has challenged the status quo and ignited the SDN movement. We have built platforms that naysayers said were doomed to fail, we’ve proven what’s possible, and today a number of our platforms have been deployed in production networks and others are now production ready and expected to be broadly adopted. I’m exceptionally proud of our team and of the work we have accomplished to date – but our work is not done. Today we are simply shifting to a new model optimized for the next phase of our transformative journey towards open networking. While ONF’s engineering team is moving to Intel, the work of ONF proceeds unabated, and I’m more bullish than ever that its impact will continue to grow.”
