Mirantis is partnering with Citrix, Metaswitch Networks and Overture Networks to provide customers with the convenience of one network functions virtualization (NFV) vendor — or at least a point company that validates that the NFV pieces work together.

Mirantis considers itself a pure-play OpenStack company, but its customers want all the components of NFV, including the OpenStack fabric, service chaining, and OSS/BSS.

“There are a lot of components, yet [customers] want these components to work in a seamless fashion,” says Mirantis co-founder and CMO Boris Renski. Carriers expect Mirantis to deliver some kind of “NFV magic,” he says, so the company is assembling partners to make it happen.

“We decided to stay pure to OpenStack, and for everything we do with NFV, we’ll focus on OpenStack as a virtual infrastructure manager [VIM],” says Renski, referring to a key element of the NFV architecture drafted by the ETSI industry specifications group.

As for why Mirantis should be the company leading an NFV partnership, Renski says NFV by definition is something that is large-scale. Mirantis, for example, is doing integrated cloud services across AT&T’s networks. “The last thing these guys want is a single [equipment] vendor that puts its opinion on them when it comes to how to do NFV,” he says, referring to large carriers in general.

The partnerships being announced Thursday are the first step in this strategy. Mirantis will offer an NFV reference architecture and OpenStack certification program for partners' virtual network functions (VNFs) and other NFV elements. Validations have already been completed for Citrix NetScaler, Metaswitch's Perimeta Session Border Controller and Overture Networks’ Ensemble Service Orchestrator.

Mirantis will pre-test its partners’ technology components against the particular use case requested by a customer.