Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) says it has not been completely kicked out of the Telefónica Unica project; rather, HPE says the Spanish carrier has decided to bring more vendors into the fold.

In March, Telefónica had picked HPE to lead Unica, an architecture that would use network functions virtualization (NFV) to let Telefónica offer services from the cloud. The assignment was a coup for HPE, which had begun touting a full NFV framework called OpenNFV.

On Christmas Eve, Light Reading reported that HPE was ousted as the lead of the project. HPE says that Telefónica is soliciting participation from other vendors and that a multivendor network was one of the carrier's goals from the start.

Here's the full statement provided by an HPE spokesman today:

Unica represents an industry first for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Telefónica and the industry as we pioneer building a truly multivendor, open carrier network. HPE was selected as the technology provider and systems integrator of Unica earlier this year. Consistent with Telefónica's intent for Unica to be truly multivendor, it has opened up an RFQ update with a priority on multivendor participation. HPE will work closely with other NFV ecosystem vendors that might be brought into the project and will continue to work with Telefónica on our planned Unica solution deliverable.