Well that didn't take long.

It's only been 48 hours since we issued the first invitations to our NFV interoperability evaluation program and I'm delighted to announce that the first participants have already signed up. (Metaswitch, the first to reply, took less than an hour... Kudos and points for their alacrity!).

Now, I'm not going to say that I'm completely surprised, since Light Reading and EANTC wouldn't be putting this much effort into the program unless we had seen that there was a clear and present demand for interoperability from the world's leading service providers. But I will say that I am absolutely delighted by the number and quality of the respondents.

Here's the roster of participants that have committed to testing interoperability with either NFVi or VNF solutions, or both:

In addition to the above vendors, we have received dozens of responses from other companies that are perusing the invitation, and more participants will undoubtedly follow.

I have been overseeing laboratory testing on and off for over 20 years in our industry and, factually, I've never seen a response as expeditious as this. Clearly this is a good omen for this program, and for the state of NFV (and the New IP revolution).

Of course, not everyone was quite so enthusiastic. We did have one company that told us they thought our evaluation would promote creation of proprietary industry standards, whereas their customers "want open standards."

This is not a position that holds water, partly because we have invited (and very much want) open source projects such as OPNFV to be included in the evaluation. And secondly because it is this particular vendor's customers (quite literally, its actual customers) that are asking us to perform the interoperability testing in the first place.

A huge "thank you" from myself and EANTC to the companies listed above for having the confidence and the courage to step up and deliver on service providers' requests for independent and authoritative interoperability validation.

This is what industry leadership looks like.