ADLINK, a leading provider of Edge Computing, today announced its membership as a Collaborating Innovator of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) operator-led consortium. ADLINK and its broad range of strategic ecosystem partners continue to play an increasingly important role in influential industry consortiums such as ONF, Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter (CORD) and Open Compute Project (OCP) by working together on advanced, open architecture business initiatives.

As an open, collaborative, non-profit consortium driving transformation of network infrastructure and carrier business models, the ONF serves as the umbrella for a number of projects, building solutions by leveraging network disaggregation, white box economics, open source software and software-defined standards to revolutionize the carrier industry. Working closely with leading communication service providers and equipment vendors on various open source projects, the ONF leverages its released reference designs to facilitate the roll-out of next-generation networking solutions, significantly driving down both Capex and Opex for the whole ecosystem and opening up enormous business opportunities for new services.

"Telecom operators are driving solutions based on open hardware and software architectures, enabling infrastructure for quick time-to-revenue while lowering TCO for emerging Edge and 5G deployment. At this inflection point, the ONF is well positioned to catalyze a transformation of the networking industry with its newly established strategic plan," said Jeff Sharpe, ADLINK director of product strategy and business development for networking and communications. "We are very excited to join and contribute to ONF, as we will be able to leverage the ONF's community resources and reference designs to develop next-generation networking solutions. Our ultimate goal is to bring ADLINK's innovation and unique value proposition for network transformation to the carrier industry."

ADLINK began its focus on open architecture by becoming a major contributor to the OCP more than five years ago. At the ONF, ADLINK will leverage its Open Compute Carrier-grade Edge Reference Architecture (OCCERA), OCP and GPU-based solutions to develop next-generation networking and communications platforms, enabling use cases such as Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC), universal Customer Premises Equipment (uCPE) and extremely low-latency Edge Compute platforms for 5G networks. ADLINK's solutions will effectively address the requirements for low- latency, high-bandwidth and compute-intensive applications driven by the needs of security, deep packet inspection (DPI), Edge Computing, virtual network functions (VNF), 5G evolution and revenue producing solutions for operators.

As a leading ODM, ADLINK is an ideal contributor to the ONF-envisioned business model with its high quality design and manufacturing capabilities, producing cost- effective COTS/custom solutions with reduced time-to-market. ADLINK offers design services in every major geographic region, which benefits customers with increased responsiveness, short delivery lead-time and ease of doing business locally. ADLINK also ensures best practices in product lifecycle management by leveraging its long- standing strategic partnerships with major processor and software vendors.