24 February 2017, Shenzhen, China – ZTE Corporation (0763.HK / 000063.SZ), a major international provider of telecommunications, enterprise and consumer technology solutions for the Mobile Internet, today announced that it has become a Platinum member of the Linux Foundation Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) project, the new name for the combined Open Orchestrator (OPEN-O) open source community and Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy (ECOMP) project, demonstrating its commitment to the open source community.

The ONAP aims to create a model and meta-data driven reference open platform for service providers to support full lifecycle management of cloud-centric, SDN/NFV based networks. The new project extends the scope of the original OPEN-O project and introduces the capability of traditional operation support systems (OSS).

ZTE, one of the initial supporters of the OPEN-O project, is the second largest code contributor in the OPEN-O SUN release. Currently, four project team leaders from ZTE are leading four projects in the OPEN-O Mercury release. During the planning phase of the OPEN-O Mercury release, ZTE realised that in addition to deployment and orchestration, SDN/NFV based network transformation demands more automation capabilities from network management, in order to meet the agility and flexibility of new networks and services. Based on this, ZTE completed policy and alarm analysis project proposals.

The OPEN-O community has accumulated rich experience in the practice of orchestration system verification for typical scenario use cases, while the original ECOMP project has an excellent consideration of policy, analysis and global inventory. With the combination of the OPEN-O community and ECOMP project, more operators and vendors will be able to work together to contribute to the new ONAP project. ZTE believes the ONAP community will create a good opportunity for the development of next generation SDN/NFV based network management and an orchestration reference platform. ZTE also believes that its contribution to the OPEN-O code base, especially in its management and orchestration (MANO) approach (which conforms to European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) NFV specification), will facilitate the ONAP’s rapid development.

As a Platinum member, ZTE is committed to the merged ONAP community and will work comprehensively with partners in the ecosystem in the areas of modelling, architecture, code developing and marketing. ZTE believes that the ONAP will provide strong support for accelerating commercial deployments of the next generation of cloud-centric SDN/NFV networks.