E-commerce giant Alibaba Group has joined the OpenDaylight Project. The Chinese powerhouse plans to share with the group its experience building and integrating its own software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) tools into its infrastructure.

OpenDaylight is an open source SDN project hosted by the Linux Foundation to advance SDN adoption and create the basis for NFV.

The online shopping firm says its SDN-based platform powered the company’s 2015 online shopping event, called the 11.11 Global Shopping Festival, which attracted more than 115 million buyers and supported 467 million delivery orders in 24 hours. The event also resulted in $14 billion in payments being processed through the Alipay system.

Alibaba’s membership in OpenDaylight — joining other network owners that have become Silver-level sponsors, such as AT&T and Comcast — comes as no surprise. At the OpenDaylight Summit last June, OpenDaylight executive director Neela Jacques announced that Chinese social media firm Tencent was joining OpenDaylight. Like Alibaba, Tencent has a homegrown SDN solution that it uses to improve its data center interconnect. However, as the company realized the bigger potential for SDN, it joined OpenDaylight.

Tencent also started meeting with Baidu and Alibaba to discuss each company’s experiences with OpenDaylight code.

Also, earlier this year, OpenDaylight issued its fourth release, called Beryllium. This release adds some features aimed at bringing the SDN framework up to speed in production environments.  Beryllium also supports a broad set of use cases, which organizers say provides a foundation for networks of the future.