Here are the top stories SDxCentral wrangled this week related to SDN, NFV, cloud, and virtualization infrastructure:

De-Risking NFV via Systems Integration or NFV One-Stop-Shops — Because of its complexity, NFV has put service providers between a rock and a hard place.

New Ericsson CEO Has Big Job Ahead — The company needs to embrace open source and analytics to thrive.

New Arista Programmable Switches Use Cavium XPliant Chips — Arista (and Brocade) built its latest switches around upstart Cavium rather than Broadcom.

Here are the week’s strays and stragglers we roped for you:

Microsoft completed its previously announced acquisition of LinkedIn.

Huawei reportedly acquired Toga Networks in a deal worth more than $100 million.

IBM announced a blockchain ecosystem to help accelerate the creation of blockchain networks.

The Linux Foundation appointed Arpit Joshipura to the organization’s executive leadership team as general manager of networking and orchestration.

The OpenDaylight Project announced that Baidu, Chinese-language Internet search provider, has joined the project at the silver level.

Brain4Net and NoviFlow formed a partnership offering comprehensive software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV)-based solutions for operators and enterprises.

Qualcomm launched the Centriq 2400 series of server microprocessors. The 48-core devices are based on the ARMv8 architecture and appear to be the first server chips based on a 10nm manufacturing process.

Radisys announced that its CG-OpenRack-19 specification was accepted into the Open Compute Project.

Tufin extended its Tufin Orchestration Suite to integrate with Palo Alto Networks Panorama Network Security Management.

Artificial intelligence firm Aria Networks announced an agreement with China's BOCO Inter Telecom Limited to optimize telco networks.

Procera partnered with Arrow Systems Integration to provide bundled analytics and network intelligence technology to the virtualization market.

Metaswitch announced that Citizens Fiber of Pennsylvania selected a full suite of software switches and applications as the basis for its network transformation to an all-IP future.

Here are the other stories SDxCentral covered this week: