The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) has launched a certification program for engineers and marketing professionals to prove their SDN chops.

The ONF-Certified SDN Professional (OCSP) Program will provide vendor-neutral SDN credentials to complement certifications in other technologies and programming languages. The OCSP will offer two certifications:

• ONF-Certified SDN Engineer (OCSE), for entry-level SDN engineering and networking professionals: Certifies technical and engineering-level knowledge of SDN technologies, architectures, and deployment solutions.
• ONF-Certified SDN Associate (OCSA), for entry-level sales and marketing professionals: Validates concept-level knowledge of SDN technologies, architectures, and deployment solutions.

The ONF will hold a series of workshops later this month to identify key learning objectives for each certification, and it will begin holding exams for the OCSE and OCSA in early 2015. Once the ONF creates the certification exam blueprints, it plans to publish them as open standards.

On the vendor side, ONF offers its OpenFlow Conformance Testing Program. Independent, accredited labs conduct the conformance tests on networking hardware and software to verify compliance with the OpenFlow specification.