Cisco, Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia are teaming up to improve interoperability for operators running network functions virtualisation deployments.
The NFV Interoperability Testing Initiative (NFV-ITI) will help operators address the challenges associated with NFV deployment and cloud transformation.
The vendors said the initiative, which supports the Open Platform for NFV project, has the aim of promoting competition and creating consensus on testing and support for certain scenarios.
Vendors will cooperate to support interoperability of virtualised network functions in specific situations to try and speed up commercial rollouts and reduce time to market for new products and services.
The initiative joins an increasingly crowded group of projects, such as the ETSI NFV Testing Working Group, testing projects at OPNFV and Network Vendor Interoperability Testing.
In a statement, the people behind NFV-ITI said it would complement existing projects and recommend test cases and criteria, processes, methods, guidelines, templates and test tools.
It appears another cross vendor body is needed with delegates at this year’s SDN World Congress told that operators are facing trouble with staffing, uncertainty and speed of change.
[Read more: Operators look for clarity in relationships with virtualisation vendors]
Ron Haberman, Vice-President, CloudBand, Nokia, said: “Supporting the creation of the NFV-ITI is another step towards ensuring service providers can smoothly migrate to cloud networks within today’s multi-vendor environment.
“While the network model is changing with NFV, the need for true carrier-grade performance remains paramount. Ensuring the integration, automation and interoperability of robust, well-architected virtualisation solutions is critical to the performance, scalability, resiliency and manageability our customers demand.”
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