Israel-based ECI is adding its SDN know-how to the Open Network Operating System (ONOS) community by developing an open source SDN controller.

In addition to contributing the SDN controller code to ONOS, ECI will also use it in its own SmartLIGHT portfolio. As for the code itself, ECI is taking a different approach by extending configurations and autonomous behaviors to OpenFlow switches.

According to an ECI spokesperson, the SDN controller is currently in proof-of-concept trials with some of its customers, but the company didn’t provide a release date.

ECI joined ONOS as a contributor in the middle of this year. ONOS mentioned ECI in its Emu code-release earlier this month for supporting ONOS use cases for multi-layer SDN control of IP and optical layer networks.

While there are other consortia to pick from, his company chose to be an ONOS collaborator and contributor because its platform was more suitable for ECI’s WAN offerings, ECI CTO Hayim Porat says. ECI’s customer base includes service providers, utilities, and data centers, and working with ONOS fits with its goals of providing large-scale platforms and programmable networks to its users.

ECI, which has an extensive history in the packet-optical transport space, started working on an SDN controller as part of its Elastic network strategy, which it says is a vendor-agnostic ecosystem. While ECI has traditionally been a hardware vendor for telecom, it's making the move from hardware to software by using SDN. It also supports NFV on its Neptune platform.