Sarwar Raza, a senior SDN executive at HP, has taken the chairperson role at the Open Networking Foundation (ONF)'s recently-formed Northbound Interfaces Working Group.

That might sound like a mountaineering club but it is, in fact, a critical group within the Open Networking Foundation , which is working on multiple fronts to develop SDN architectures for enterprises and network operators and promote the use of the OpenFlow protocol in next generation networks.

The importance of the northbound interface in SDN architectures has been amply explained by the ONF's executive director Dan Pitt in his most recent contributed article in Light Reading. (See Compass Check: ONF & the Northbound API(s).)

The Northbound Interfaces Working Group was announced in October and held its first meeting in November, with participation from multiple industry organizations, vendors and network operators. Raza, who is director of Cloud Networking and Software Defined Networking (SDN) in the Advanced Technology Group at HP Networking, was appointed at the November meeting. (See the full details in this press release.)

The ONF now has a number of new groups of particular relevance to telecom operators, including discussion groups focused on security, layers 4-7 and carrier-grade SDN as well as the Northbound Interface group.

— Ray Le Maistre, Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading