A recent interoperability validation between Wind River and Huawei is a step forward for both companies. Wind River scores Huawei as a big partnership win for its NFV platform, while Huawei further disaggregates its networking solutions.

The two companies recently announced interoperability of Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. 's vEPC/vIMSsoftware and MANO running in conjunction with Wind River Systems Inc. 's Carrier Grade NFV Titanium Server on Huawei's FusionServer E9000 server. (See Huawei, Wind River Complete NFV Testing.)

Interoperability tests are a dime a dozen, but this one has a couple of wrinkles, Charlie Ashton, Wind River director of business development, tells Light Reading. (See Time for Some New Acronyms for CRAN.)

Huawei is the first telecom equipment manufacturer to partner with Wind River on VNFs, he says. Previous VNF partners have been traditional software companies, or hardware companies transitioning to a software model, such as Brocade, Genband and Metaswitch.

Wind River also partnered with Nokia on hardware -- running Wind River software on Nokia's hardware -- but in the Huawei case it's not just Wind River's NFV platform software running on Huawei's hardware, but also Huawei's VNFs running on Wind River's platform software. (See Wind River Titanium Server Validated on Nokia AirFrame .)

The partnership with Huawei is good news for Wind River -- a finalist in Light Reading's 2015 Leading Lights awards -- and will help that company gain traction in carrier-grade virtualization, says Heavy Reading analyst Caroline Chappell. (See Leading Lights 2015 Finalists: Most Innovative NFV Product Strategy (Vendor).)

For Huawei, Wind River interoperability validation is a step in the direction of decoupling its software from its hardware. "Huawei is the last vertically integrated network provider," says Heavy Reading analyst Roz Roseboro.

Ashton agrees. "Obviously, they're very serious about decoupling different layers of their solution and offering them separately," he says. "That's right in line with what service providers want from NFV, to get away from single-vendor locked-in solutions."

Find out more about network functions virtualization on Light Reading's NFV Channel.

Wind River is an Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC) company. Huawei has a prior relationship with the US chip maker. Most notably, the Huawei FusionServer runs Intel chips. Huawei also uses Wind River Linux.

Wind River operates at arm's length from Intel, says Chappell.

NFV is a key technology for New IP, helping network operators provide the agility required by customers.

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