New VP of Standards and Membership, Timon Sloane, introduces himself and shares his passion for the “new” ONF.
As we enter the New Year, I want to kick things off by formally introducing myself to the ONF community. I am excited to serve as VP of Standards and Membership, leading our efforts with SDN standards, skills certification and with the membership at large. I am also very much looking forward to the opportunity before us in combining open source with standards as ONF and ON.Lab merge.
As part of coming up to speed, I continue to meet with a broad cross-section of the ONF community, and not to my surprise, I am thoroughly impressed. Our community is bursting with dynamic, energetic people full of talent and passion for SDN, NFV, open source and more. The opportunity lying before us with the combining of ONF and ON.Lab is tremendous, and may I say, unprecedented.
Already I have received a few inquiries on what the direction of the new organization is, and I can sum it up in a few words: use-case driven standards activity backed up by multiple working software implementations. Like we have seen in the past, ‘rough consensus and running code’ works as a model for efficient and meaningful standards activity. By bringing the strengths of both organizations together we intend to push this model to new heights as we continue to champion, drive and accelerate the open networking movement.
In becoming one, we intend to cross pollinate our operator relationships from the ON.Labs work with the cross-industry collaborative strengths of the current ONF membership. Take note though - this doesn’t mean that ON.Labs’ ONOS and CORD projects are the exclusive priority of the new organization. If we want to have a substantial marketplace impact, we must create a broad ecosystem. Standards are the vehicle for fueling the ecosystem, and standards are only successful when multiple parties bring implementations to market.
What does this mean? Here’s how I’d sum up my view on where we need to focus:
- Multiple open source references are to be encouraged and fostered
- Vendor proprietary implementations and enhancements are welcome
- Multiple tiers of the ecosystem are needed to deliver production ready solutions
- Our relationships with operators, vendors, other standards organizations and the research community remain the lifeblood of the ONF
As a vendor-neutral non-profit, ONF is interested in driving the broad ecosystem. I am confident that we can find ways to balance our objectives, and I am certain that we have the horsepower in the community to pull it off.
Thank you for welcoming me into the ONF community. Cheers to the New Year and to the “new” ONF!
- Timon Sloane, VP of Standards and Membership
