Telecommunication operators and their vendors can save millions of dollars in testing and certification by using the numerous open source tools and platforms lying under the Linux Foundation umbrella, according to Beth Cohen, SDN product strategist at Verizon.

More specifically, Cohen was referring to those projects under the Linux Foundation’s Networking group. Those projects include the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP), Tungsten Fabric, and Anuket.

During a panel discussion at the recent Open Networking & Edge Executive Forum, Cohen said that one of her co-workers noted to her that they could save “millions of dollars in testing just by adopting some of these solutions.”

“One of my co-workers used to say, if we adopt internally within Verizon, adopt the Anuket reference model as our reference infrastructure. It will probably save 10% of our testing, which, you know, that's not an insignificant amount of testing,” Cohen said.

Cohen added that vendors can also save time and resources as they do not need to “build unique platforms for every single one of their telco users and their customers.”

“It's not like we're not going to test because all telcos are going to do that,” Cohen explained. “But if we can sort of say to the vendors, if you meet the Anuket short program, and that means that there's a whole bunch of tests that have already been done, so we can say, OK, you're good.”

Cohen is currently co-chair of the Anuket project that was established by LF Networking early last year. It was formed by combining the previously independent Common NFVi Telco Taskforce (CNTT) and the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) projects.

Anuket is designed to facilitate and promote a consistent view and expectation of cloud-native technologies with respect to infrastructure and workloads. It’s tasked with bringing together infrastructure vendors like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Red Hat where telecom platforms run with the vendors like Nokia and Ericsson that produce those workloads.

For carriers like Verizon, these workloads are increasingly becoming their next-generation services like 5G and edge, which highlights the need for carriers to gain as much operational and financial efficiencies from these collaborative services as possible.

Cohen said that the combination of external forces, which includes making it easier for everyone to share resources, and internal forces, which equals financial efficiency, is driving the necessary collaboration.

“We're also working with other open source communities. OpenInfra has the edge working group, as well as MEF and ONS … there's a lot going on across all of these communities,” Cohen added.