NICE, France -- TM Forum Live! 2015 -- Arno, the first release from the Open Platform for NFV Project, is set to be released, possibly as soon as Thursday, the project's director Heather Kirksey told delegates here today in the south of France.

The release, which is arriving only slightly later than originally envisaged, will provide the project's initial carrier-grade open source reference architecture designed to speed up NFV deployment. (See OPNFV Release Taking Longer Than Planned for the details of what's in store.)

The Open Platform for NFV Project Inc. was launched less than a year ago and has been increasing its membership since, attracting many major names to the cause from the vendor and operator side. (See the OPNFV membership list.)

Kirksey says she is "still surprised at how much excitement there is from the operators around open source," and is happy to see them embracing what, for them, is a new way of working and developing.

Want to know more about OPNFV and the progress toward deployment of NFV? Hear Heather Kirksey and many other industry experts address virtualization at next week's Big Telecom Event on June 9-10 in Chicago. Get yourself registered today or get left behind!

A bigger challenge than embracing open source is getting to grips with DevOps ways of working and adapting to different methodologies. It's a major shift for operators to "move away from the waterfall to the agile mentality. That's a major cultural challenge that is greater than accepting open source," says Kirksey, who is heading to the Big Telecom Event in Chicago next week to spread the OPNFV word further during a conference session on Managing the Transition to Virtualization.

The release of Arno will be just the next step for OPNFV, which is already working towards extending and expanding the capabilities it covers, particularly in terms of test and measurement. "Testing for release 1 is pretty basic but we have additional testing projects that are more end-to-end in nature and based on traffic profiles that come from the operators," she notes.

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