CORD Project welcomes five new collaborators

Sunnyvale, Calif, CORD Summit, July 29, 2016–The CORD™ Project, an open source project that delivers cloud economics and agility to the telco Central Office (CO), today announces Broadband Forum, Lime Micro, NTT East, Quortus and Telefonica have joined as collaborators of the Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter initiative.

"The CORD community continues to quickly grow and attract a diverse range of collaborators eager to work with us," said Guru Parulkar, executive director of ON.Lab and board member of the CORD Project. "We are united in our focus on developing and building CORD into a mainstream solution for service providers as quickly as possible. Besides our existing service provider partners, more than 20 active collaborators and many other global service providers have also expressed interest in wanting to use CORD."

The five new collaborator companies also joined the ONOS® Project, the software-defined networking (SDN) operating system of choice for service providers and the foundation for numerous successful CORD use cases, including residential, mobile and enterprise use.

CORD also announced today the first open reference implementation of CORD built on best-in-class SDN, network functions virtualization (NFV), Cloud and open source platforms such as ONOS, Trellis, OpenStack, Docker and XOS.

A newly independent project from ON.Lab and The Linux Foundation, CORD leverages merchant silicon, white boxes servers, bare metal switches and open source software platforms to offer today’s traditional connectivity services, as well as tomorrow’s Cloud-based services, to residential, enterprise and mobile customers in a common unified infrastructure.

More About the New CORD Collaborators:

• Broadband Forum is working closely with the CORD community to create a better understanding of the requirements of next-generation broadband services and to demonstrate how these can be met with the CORD platform.
• Lime Micro, a provider of open source Software Defined Radio products for 2G to 5G wireless networks, is collaborating with CORD Project on a Proof of Concept (POC) on the Mobility Datacenter (M-CORD). The work targets a number of applications including rural area coverage and use cases for mobile edge computing.
• Nippon Telegraph and Telephone East Corporation (NTT East) is a regional telecommunications services provider in east Japan.
• Quortus, which is focused on delivering core network functions as software, is at the forefront of development in mobile edge computing. The company is working with the CORD Project to boost the efforts of operators and app developers working to translate new network capabilities into services.
• Telefónica is one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world by market capitalization and number of customers. The company has significant presence in 21 countries and 347 million accesses around the world. Telefónica has a strong presence in Spain, Europe and Latin America.

About CORD Project

CORD™ (Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter) brings datacenter economics and cloud flexibility to the telco Central Office and to the entire access network. CORD is an open source service delivery platform that combines SDN, NFV, and elastic cloud services to network operators and service providers. It integrates ONOS, OpenStack, Docker, and XOS—all running on merchant silicon, white-box switches, commodity servers, and disaggregated access devices. The CORD reference implementation serves as a platform for multiple domains of use, with open source communities building innovative services for residential, mobile, and enterprise network customers. The CORD ecosystem comprises ON.Lab and organizations that are funding and contributing to the CORD initiative. These organizations include AT&T, China Unicom, Comcast, Google, NTT Communications Corp., SK Telecom Co. Ltd., Verizon, Ciena Corporation, Cisco Systems, Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., Intel Corporation, NEC Corporation, Nokia, Radisys and Samsung Electronics, Co. See the full list of members, including CORD’s collaborators, and learn how you can get involved with CORD at opencord.org.

CORD is an independently funded software project hosted by The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems.

About ON.Lab

Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab) is a non-profit organization founded by SDN inventors and leaders from Stanford University and UC Berkeley to foster open source communities for developing tools and platforms to realize the full potential of SDN, NFV and cloud technologies. ON.Lab provides engineering resources on behalf of the open source ONOS, CORD, and Mininet projects among others. For further information on ON.Lab, visit http://onlab.us/.