The OPNFV Project formed an end user advisory group comprised of both OPNFV members and non-members to provide technical guidance to its developer community.

The 18 initial advisors include experts from service providers such as AT&T, British Telecom, China Mobile, Cox Communications, Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, and Sprint.

OPNFV already has the usual governing bodies, including a technical steering committee, a board of directors, and a certification and compliance committee. The end user group will provide technical and strategic guidance to those other governing bodies.

"Feedback from the ecosystem using and deploying NFV is crucial to the future direction of OPNFV,” said its director Heather Kirksey, in a prepared statement.

The end user group meets monthly to discuss key challenges, standards, network architecture, and emerging use cases related to NFV. The first meeting was held in June, and the next meeting is scheduled for Aug. 31. The group is chaired by AT&T's Steven Wright, who will serve a two-year term while delegates may serve for as long as they like.

OPNFV is only a couple of years old, and it's already had two code releases.

In a survey earlier this summer, service providers said the group was important for upstream integration with other open source projects, including OpenStack, OpenvSwitch, KVM, and OpenDaylight.

A spokesperson for OPNFV described the group's upstream work by saying OPNFV taps open source projects in compute, storage, and networking "and fills gaps where needed to meet strict carrier-grade end user requirements.

"This approach is difficult and requires an extremely complicated set of requirements, but the result is a much needed common, de facto platform for the industry to test and build NFV products and services," the spokesperson added.