SAN FRANCISCO -- The OpenDaylight Project, a community-led and industry-supported open source platform to advance Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), today announced that AT&T, ClearPath Networks and Nokia Networks have joined the project to support the development of an open, common SDN and NFV platform to enable network automation and programmability.

AT&T is building a software-defined network that doesn't just respond to customers' existing needs, but allows AT&T to deploy new services faster than ever before. Customers can adjust their services and AT&T can deploy updates and security measures in minutes instead of months.

AT&T has been using OpenDaylight since its first release and continues to by incorporating it into production for its Network on Demand capabilities. The company is submitting its customized YANG Design Studio Tool into open source through the OpenDaylight community so developers can create services that fit into AT&T's software-defined framework and any Yang driven implementation.

"Open source will speed up our innovation, lower costs and help us virtualize 75 percent of our network by 2020," said John Donovan, senior executive vice president of AT&T Technology and Operations, AT&T Inc. "Collaborating with and contributing to the open source community is crucial to drive this software shift at AT&T and in the industry. Joining the OpenDaylight Project lets us work with innovators more closely."

ClearPath Networks develops technology for cloud managed networking and distributed virtual network function lifecycle management for network operators globally. Founded in 2002, and headquartered in California, ClearPath's NFV-based Virtual Services Platform (VSP) enables mobile, fixed, and cloud operators to overcome traditional CAPEX, OPEX and system barriers that inhibit service innovation and competitive differentiation.

"As NFV and SDN rapidly converge, ClearPath intends to extend its virtualized CPE (vCPE) platform to exploit SDN. With the momentum generated by OpenDaylight over the past year surging, we are eager to leverage the numerous benefits of open source and contribute back to the community." commented Marc Cohn, senior vice president of Marketing at Clearpath Networks. Cohn was also recently re-elected as the sole Silver member board representative on the Open Daylight Board of Directors.

"We have a long experience in building telco cloud deployments based on virtualized network functions and utilizing open interfaces," said Henri Tervonen, vice president Mobile Broadband Architecture, Nokia Networks. "The future of networks is in distributed architecture and cloud platforms that enable full use of NFV and SDN."

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