Grabbing the bull by the horns, ETSI’s Industry Specifications Group for network functions virtualization (NFV) hosted a meeting this week, bringing together numerous other NFV groups and organizations doing similar work.

Development of NFV started at ETSI in January 2013 in response to a joint-carrier white paper published in October 2012, which introduced the NFV concept. Since then, the ETSI NFV community has grown to almost 300 organizations.

But simultaneously, other standards groups and open source communities have been creating NFV information models and data models. By bringing these groups together, ETSI hopes to align software-defined networking (SDN) and NFV information modeling in cloud-centric and network-centric initiatives.

The meeting this week was held at CableLabs’ offices in Louisville, Colo. The workshop was co-chaired by Michael Brenner from ClearPath Networks and Klaus Martiny from Deutsche Telekom.

Participating organizations, aside from ETSI, included 3GPP, ATIS, Broadband Forum, DMTF, IETF, ITU-T Study Group 15, MEF, OASIS/TOSCA, Open Cloud Connect, ONF, OpenDaylight Project, OPNFV, and TM Forum.

A collaboration plan was established, and the first feedback from participating organizations is due in March.