AUSTIN, Texas — Now that we've got open source factions rivaling for attention in NFV management and network orchestration (MANO), it's easy to forget that Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has had a complete MANO stack for a while.

But that doesn't mean the vendor won't take an interest in Open Source MANO (OSM) and Open-O, two MANO efforts that are getting underway. OSM launched in February, while Open-O is preparing to kick off in June.

The key is the projects' open source nature. Carriers are determined to implement NFV using as many open source elements as possible, said Prodip Sen, HPE's CTO of NFV, speaking with SDxCentral at the recent OpenStack Summit.

Carriers see open source as a way to make different vendors' software modules interchangeable, thus avoiding vendor lock-in. But in the upper layers of MANO, open source options have been lacking, Sen said. (In the lower MANO layers, it's possible to use OpenStack as a virtualized infrastructure manager.)

That's why Open-O and OSM have drawn interest, he told us.

“Those are things we have to listen to. Even if we maintain our own product, we still pay attention to open source.”

Another reason is that open source is “really the new standards arena,” Sen said. “Standards take too long to develop. This is the new, DevOps way to do them.”

HPE could end up providing some of the open source elements in hardened form, just as it does with the Helion distribution of OpenStack. Few carriers will want to assemble an open source MANO stack entirely on their own, Sen said. “Perhaps AT&T, but they're an exception.”

HPE was bound to overlap any kind of open source NFV movement, because the company's products intentionally encompass the entire NFV stack. They range from hardware, including hyperconverged or composable infrastructure, up to a product HPE calls the Service Director, which handles service orchestration across multiple physical and virtual domains and also talks to OSS and business intelligence tools.