The ONF adapts after sale of spin-off Ananki to Intel

Intel’s acquisition of Ananki, a private 5G networking company set up within the ONF last year, has meant the open-model organisation has lost the bulk of its engineering staff.

Timon Sloane

The ONF, a decade-old non-profit consortium led by the telecom operators, has developed some notable networking projects over the years such as CORD, OpenFlow, one of the first software-defined networking (SDN) standards, and Aether, the 5G edge platform.

Its joint work with the operators has led to virtualised and SDN building blocks that, when combined, can address comprehensive networking tasks such as 5G, wireline broadband and private wireless networks.

The ONF’s approach has differed from other open-source organisations. Its members pay for an in-house engineering team to co-develop networking blocks based on disaggregation, SDN and cloud.

The ONF and its members have built a comprehensive portfolio of networking functions which last year led to the organisation spinning out a start-up, Ananki, to commercialise a complete private end-to-end wireless network.

Now Intel has acquired Ananki, taking with it 44 of the ONF’s 55 staff.

“Intel acquired Ananki, Intel did not acquire the ONF,” says Timon Sloane, the ONF’s newly appointed general manager. “The ONF is still whole.”

The ONF will now continue with a model akin to other open-source organisations.

ONF’s evolution

The ONF began by tackling the emerging interest in SDN and disaggregation.

“After that phase, considered Phase One, we broke the network into pieces and it became obvious that it was complicated to then build solutions; you have these pieces that had to be reassembled,” says Sloane.

The ONF used its partner funding to set up a joint development team to craft solutions that were used to seed the industry.

The ONF pursued this approach for over six years but Sloane said that it felt increasingly that the model had run its course.“We were kind of an insular walled garden, with us and a small number of operators working on things,” says Sloane. “We needed to flip the model inside out and go broad.”

This led to the spin-out of Ananki, a separate for-profit entity that would bring in funding yet would also be an important contributor to open source. And as it grew, the thinking was that it would subsume some of the ONF’s engineering team.

“We thought for the next phase that a more typical open-source model was needed,” says Sloane. “Something like Google with Kubernetes, where one company builds something, puts it in open source and feeds it, even for a couple of years, until it grows, and the community grows around it.”

But during the process of funding Ananki, several companies expressed an interest in acquiring the start-up. The ONF will not say the other interested players but hints that it included telecom operators and hyperscalers.

The merit of Intel, says Sloane, is that it is a chipmaker with a strong commitment to open source.

Deutsche Telekom's ongoing ORAN trial in Berlin uses key components from the ONF including the SD-Fabric, 5G and 4G core functions, and the uONOS near real-time RAN Intelligent controller (RIC). Source: ONF, DT.

Post-Ananki

“Those same individuals who were wearing an ONF hat, are swapping it for an Intel hat, but are still on the leadership of the project,” says Sloane. “We view this as an accelerant for the project contributions because Intel has pretty deep resources and those individuals will be backed by others.”

The ONF acknowledges that its fixed broadband passive optical networking (PON) work is not part of Ananki’s interest. Intel understands that there are operators reliant on that project and will continue to help during a transition period. Those vendors and operators directly involved will also continue to contribute.

“If you look at every other project that we're doing: mobile core, mobile RAN, all the P4 work, programmable networks, Intel has been very active.”

Meanwhile, the ONF is releasing its entire portfolio to the open-source community.

“We've moved out of the walled-garden phase into a more open phase, focused on the consumption and adoption [of the designs,” says Sloane. The projects will stay remain under the auspices of the ONF to get the platforms adopted within networks.

The ONF will use its remaining engineers to offer its solutions using a Continuous Integration/ Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) software pipeline.

“We will continue to have a smaller engineering team focused on Continuous Integration so that we'll be able to deliver daily builds, hourly builds, and continuous regression testing - all that coming out of ONF and the ONF community,” says Sloane. “Others can use their CD pipelines to deploy and we are delivering exemplar CD pipelines if you want to deploy bare metal or in a cloud-based model.”

The ONF is also looking at creating a platform that enables the programmability of a host using silicon such as a data processing unit (DPU) as part of larger solutions.

“It's a very exciting space,” says Sloane. “You just saw the Pensando acquisition; I think that others are recognising this is a pretty attractive space.” AMD recently announced it is acquiring Pensando, to add a DPU architecture to AMD’s chip portfolio.

The ONF’s goal is to create a common platform that can be used for cloud and telecom networking and infrastructure for applications such as 5G and edge.

“And then there is of course the whole edge space, which is quite fascinating; a lot is going on there as well,” says Sloane. “So I don't think we're done by any means.”