Amdocs worked closely on certain aspects of AT&T's Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management, and Policy (ECOMP) platform. Now that ECOMP has merged with Open-O to form the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP), Amdocs is more involved than ever.

Alla Goldner, director of technology, strategy, and standardization at Amdocs, said she joined the company about a year ago specifically to work on ECOMP (which has since become ONAP).

Goldner is a member of ONAP’s technical steering committee. She’s also set up a similar technical steering committee within Amdocs. “I’m heading the ONAP-related activities in Amdocs,” she said.

Her internal team consists of “a few dozen people” working on ONAP software, and it also works on establishing internal processes within Amdocs. The team is located across parts of Israel, India, Canada, the United States, and Europe.

“Amdocs was not involved in open source projects before,” said Goldner. “This is something that is completely new.”

Since ONAP officially launched in February, more than 1,000 people have joined the project. Goldner compares this to the 3GPP, which has existed for decades and also counts about 1,000 participants.

“We’ve reached such a huge number of people in a few months only,” she said of ONAP.

When ONAP first launched, it counted about 11 modules, or functional projects. But Goldner said that has expanded to more than 30 projects. ONAP has added targeted projects such as a common controller framework. It’s also added cross-functional projects related to integration and validation.

Goldner said Amdocs' participation varies. In some projects the vendor has committers going through code. In other projects, Amdocs contributors help write code. There are several projects where Amdocs doesn't contribute but monitors the projects. “We really monitor pretty much everything,” she said.

The participants in ONAP are scrambling to issue the group’s first code release. This process involves merging millions of lines of code from ECOMP and Open-O in addition to all the new projects within ONAP.

For its first release targeted for November, ONAP has two major objectives, said Goldner. It wants to have one set of code, and it wants to support three use cases to show how ONAP works. The three initial use cases are: residential virtual customer premises equipment (vCPE), voice over LTE (VoLTE), and a virtual firewall.

The residential vCPE use case was originally brought to the ONAP community by Amdocs. It uses open source virtual network functions (VNFs).

The VoLTE use case was brought to ONAP by China Mobile. It was initially based on Open-O modules. This project uses commercial VNFs from Huawei and ZTE.

Finally, the virtual firewall use case uses a single, simple VNF, said Goldner. The VNF is used  to “make sure we haven’t broken anything,” she said. “It’s convenient for testing.”

ONAP is already starting to think about its next use cases. On the table right now it’s considering 5G-related use cases and enterprise vCPE.