Ciena announced today it would contribute functionality from its Blue Planet division to the Open Networking Automation Platform (ONAP) Policy Framework.

The goal is to provide service providers that have deployed ONAP with more flexibility for creating and administrating intent-based policies while supporting automation use cases.

ONAP is an open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation that aims to provide a service level orchestration layer for automating physical and virtual network functions. ONAP refers to its Policy Framework as the “decision-making component” of its orchestration system serving as the “source of truth” for policy decisions.

Blue Planet focuses on artificial intelligence (AI)-driven network automation. The division’s portfolio spans multiple products and capabilities including multi-domain service orchestration, NFV orchestration, analytics, a network health predictor, route optimization and assurance, virtual WAN, and SDN-based domain control for Ciena packet and optical networks.

“As the industry prepares for more on-demand services like 5G network slicing and network-as-a-service, service providers are looking for automation solutions that both contribute to ONAP and complement it,” said Kailem Anderson, VP of portfolio and engineering at Blue Planet, in a statement. “Blue Planet is invested in supporting service providers in using automation to transform and future-proof their networks.”

The company is now “componentizing” it much of its portfolio to make individual pieces of the Blue Planet software stack available to service providers. Blue Planet claims this will allow global service providers to augment ONAP with its own automation capabilities.

Blue Planet’s contributions will add new functionality to the ONAP’s Policy Framework, which it says plays an important role in automation, such as the placement of virtual network functions (VNFs) to meet dynamic service requirements or to help restore the network after an outage.

The company says this strategy will enable service providers already using ONAP technologies to integrate micro-services from Blue Planet within ONAP using standard APIs. “This provides them the freedom to combine open source and commercial solutions to accelerate their automation initiatives,” the company claims.

“We greatly value contributions to ONAP from all strategic players as we work together as a community to accelerate real-time, policy-driven orchestration,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager of networking and orchestration at the Linux Foundation, in a statement. “Blue Planet’s continued support is a testament of its commitment to open source and advancing today’s networks.”