Earlier this month, Iain Morris from Light Reading reported that Orange is starting their '5G Plus Automation' RFP effort this year and the message to vendors is clear, "If you can't support ONAP interfaces, don't bother responding."
As an ONAP products & services, company, this news could not have been better. ONAP is about 1.5 years old and the commercial activity around the project has had a slow start. However, this announcement should change that. Once an operator adopts ONAP, vendors will have no option but to ensure interoperability. As more vendors support ONAP, more operators will adopt, thus kicking off the proverbial virtuous cycle.
But what does supporting ONAP interfaces mean? There are three broad categories of interfaces:
While all interfaces are important, the most critical one at this time is VNF/PNF (aka xNF) onboarding due to the sheer magnitude of xNFs out there. The ONAP community provides very detailed guidelines/documentation on how to write and package an xNF for ONAP consumption. The main requirements are:
As you can see, while VNF vendors might be able to get away with a quick demo with just item number 2, a full ONAP interop is a LOT more involved. Furthermore, even within a category e.g. monitoring, a vendor can support just 1 event for a demo, but will have to support the full set of events for production use.
The above article is just the start. More and more operators will require ONAP compatibility as 5G RFPs start to roll out. As a VNF vendor, I think your two choices are: A) Get a head-start and use ONAP compatibility as a competitive advantage, or B) Wait for the RFP and scramble. Not supporting ONAP at all, I don't think is a realistic option.
In either scenario, Aarna Networks is ready to help. If you are new to ONAP, check out our free eBook. Or request one of our popular ONAP trainings. When you are ready to play with ONAP, request our ONAP deployment or ONAP VNF onboarding professional services.