ONF celebrates membership growth and OpenFlow® Conformance with a ceremony in Beijing
My recent trip to Beijing was chock-full of great things to celebrate for ONF including new member companies, conformance certifications, and rapid adoption of open SDN in China.
During the SDN Technology Conference, we had seven new ONF members eager to sign an agreement to be part of our organization and dedicate their companies to the SDN cause.
We welcomed Baidu, CATR, China Telecom, DCN, GreeNet, H3C, and xNet to the organization with a small ceremony in which representatives from each company made their way to a stage to sign a membership agreement. Present in the room were the new members as well as members of the press. The stage was set up so that I was in the center between two chairs. I signed alongside each member company, and Liu Dong, CEO of the Beijing Internet Institute (BII), acted as the witness and signed each document as well.
ONF now has five of the six most prominent network operators in China as member companies, which illustrates a steady cadence of adoption. Momentum in China, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea indicates that Asia has an open-mind for new approaches to networking, a willingness to embrace new technology for competitive advantage, and a desire to move quickly.
Also during my trip, we were happy to award DCN, a new-generation global provider for data communications, equipment, solution and infrastructure, with a certificate of conformance for OpenFlow® 1.0. The ONF OpenFlow® Conformance Testing Program was launched in July 2013 and provides networking vendors with the opportunity to demonstrate compliance with the OpenFlow® specification. OpenFlow® conformance is important because it builds customer confidence in the products they buy.
Our surge of new members shows a strong interest in SDN as an approach to networking, and it supports ONF as an evangelist of open SDN for the end user and the leader in spearheading this movement. The solidarity of the signing ceremony shows that companies in China are proud to be part of this community and know how important it is to be visible and actively involved in the SDN movement.
- Dan Pitt, Executive Director
