Amdocs leads ETSI and ONAP compliancy for VNF onboarding automation tools to accelerate NFV ecosystem

Amdocs paves the way for fully automated VNF on-boarding for frictionless and fast delivery of network services to market

Amdocs (NASDAQ: DOX), a leading provider of software and services to communications and media companies, today announced that it is driving the industry’s specification efforts to create a standard virtual network function (VNF) packaging format that will enable the automation of VNF onboarding and acceptance testing. This standardization will allow VNFs to be interoperable with independently developed network functions virtualization (NFV) management and orchestration systems, thereby providing a major boost to NFV adoption.

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As a leading member of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), Amdocs has taken a key role in progressing NFV in the market with the aim of converging on a common approach to describing VNFs, automation tool chains and integration strategy. As a founding platinum member of the Linux Foundation’s Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP), Amdocs will also take a leading role in the Linux Foundation’s newly created working group responsible for the standardization of VNF packages, their validation testing and compliance certification. Amdocs will drive industry collaboration by standardizing and templating systems to streamline and automate VNF onboarding, integration and lifecycle management processes based on both ETSI and ONAP NFV specifications.

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Currently, the complexity associated with onboarding VNFs is a major disincentive to NFV adoption. A recent Analysys Mason research report^[1] notes that “poor standardization for VNF modelling and packaging, and the lack of tools for codifying the onboarding and lifecycle automation routines are slowing NFV adoption.”

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“Amdocs taking the lead in the ETSI NFV working groups to drive standardization of VNF onboarding is great news for the industry,” said Anil Rao, Principal Analyst, Analysys Mason. “Standardization of VNF definition, packaging, and data model specification for VNF descriptors is a subject that must be tackled urgently. The success of these initiatives will accelerate the operationalization of NFV by delivering standardized VNFs to service providers, ultimately enabling the CSPs to rapidly design and deliver NFV based services to their customers.”

“As an industry pioneer in the domain of NFV, and a major ONAP open source code contributor, Amdocs is committed to standardizing the VNF packaging format,” said Anthony Goonetilleke, group president, Amdocs Technology. “Standardization will reduce barriers, simplify and shorten service provider VNF onboarding and adoption and reduce implementation time and complexity as well as lower overall costs for all stakeholders. It will also enable automatic execution of VNF onboarding and acceptance testing, and allow VNFs to be interoperable.”