Open Networking Foundation Announces Restructuring of Board of Directors to Align the Missions of ONF and ON.Lab - Linux Foundation

New board to complete merger of ONF and ON.Lab organizations and chart a course for the future of SDN

MENLO PARK, Calif., February 14, 2017–Today the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is announcing its new Board of Directors. The board has been reformulated to represent the interests of both ONF and the Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab), and will oversee the merger of ONF and ON.Lab expected to be completed by the third quarter of 2017.

The new board includes one member at large elected by the ONF membership and two project members representing each of the industry leading open source software projects, CORD® (Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter) and and ONOS® (Open Network Operating System (ONOS).  With these changes, the ONF’s new board blends representation from leading global tier 1 network operators with the recognized industry visionaries who created the SDN movement.

The new board includes:

• Andre Fuetsch – President, AT&T Labs and Chief Technology Officer
• Chairman/President: Dr. Urs Hölzle – Senior Vice President, Technical Infrastructure & Google Fellow, Google
• Fabian Schneider – Senior Researcher, NEC
• Dai Kashiwa – Director of Technology Development, NTT Communications
• Jennifer Rexford – Gordon Y.S. Wu Professor of Engineering, Computer Science Department, Princeton University
• Alex Choi – CTO, Executive Vice President and Head of Corporate R&D Center, SK Telecom
• Guru Parulkar, Exec Director of ONF and ON.Lab and Exec Director of Stanford Platform Lab
• Nick McKeown – Professor, EE and CS, Stanford University
• Srini Kalapala – Vice President, Global Technology and Supplier Strategy, Verizon

“The new ONF board assembles an impressive group of recognized industry luminaries,” said Michael Howard, senior research director and advisor, carrier networks, IHS Markit. “Our recent research shows that more than 70 percent of operators worldwide are planning to deploy CORD in their central offices, with 30 percent by the end of 2017 and an additional 40 percent in 2018 or later. Given this traction, I’m not surprised by the caliber of tier 1 operators represented on the board.”

Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab) has created the leading open source platforms CORD® (Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter) and ONOS® (Open Network Operating System (ONOS) for service providers. Founded by SDN’s inventors and leaders to foster an open source community to realize the full potential of SDN, ON.Lab brings innovative ideas from leading edge research and delivers high-quality open source platforms on which members of its ecosystem can build solutions. For further information visit http://onlab.us/.

About ON.Lab

Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab) has created the leading open source platforms CORD® (Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter) and ONOS® (Open Network Operating System (ONOS) for service providers. Founded by SDN’s inventors and leaders to foster an open source community to realize the full potential of SDN, ON.Lab brings innovative ideas from leading edge research and delivers high-quality open source platforms on which members of its ecosystem can build solutions. For further information visit http://onlab.us/.

About ONF

The Open Networking Foundation (ONF), the recognized leader and standard bearer for SDN.  Launched in 2011, the ONF has successfully taken Software Defined Networking (SDN) from obscurity to the universally accepted vision for next generation networking.

The ONF is led by a board including representation from leading operators including AT&T, Google, NTT Communications, SK Telecom and Verizon. The merger of ONF and ON.Lab is expected to be complete in late 2017. For further information visit http://www.opennetworking.org/.