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Here’s our gathering of the week’s news bits around software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), and related topics.

… Telefónica, Intel, and Red Hat announced plans to develop an NFV reference platform, driven by Telefónica's desire to deploy NFV "instantly," as an executive told Light Reading. The platform will include a management plane and, of course, Intel servers. The announcement follows a separate NFV partnership that Telefónica and Red Hat announced with Cyan.

… The OpenDaylight Project added three more members: Extreme Networks, Flextronics, and Oracle, bringing the total membership to 39.

… IDC ranked Cisco No. 1 in the Americas in the x86 blade-server market, surpassing HP. Note that there are some qualifiers in that description, but it still gives Cisco, which wasn't in the server market six years ago, some bragging rights.

… Ericsson, meanwhile, talked more about its entry into a different kind of server market: a massive cabinet full of carrier-grade server blades. Ericsson first discussed the concept in 2013. This week, an executive explained to Light Reading that the product's purpose is to ensure the performance of software in the network — an important factor, considering Ericsson wants to become more of a software company. Ericsson is also developing its own hypervisor, Light Reading noted.

… Connectem, a startup developing a virtual evolved packet core (vEPC) for mobile networks, announced it will also make use of the Network Application Visibility Library (NAVL) from Procera. NAVL will help Connectum deliver real-time application usage information.

… Netsocket expanded its Virtual Edge platform with a set of qualified third-party applications. The applications include security components, a WiFi controller, and an open-source performance visualization tool. Virtual Edge, a physically compact platform combining a switch and a cloud server, was announced in February.

… Cumulus Networks announced it's now got distribution and reseller partners in eight countries around the globe, including at least one each in Asia/Pacific and Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). The company didn't list specifics. Previously, its only channel partners were in the western United States.

… BTI Systems added Tim Pillow as senior vice president of worldwide sales, following up the appointment in April of Colin Doherty as president and CEO.

… Cavium, in conjunction with its ThunderX system-on-a-chip (SoC) launch, announced partnerships with American Megatrends, Canonical (the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution), the Fedora Project (sponsored by Red Hat), MontaVista Software, openSUSE, and Oracle. Cavium also announced Gigabyte Technology as a ThunderX customer and announced it's joined the advisory board of the Xen Project.

… One more bit about Cavium: The company will contibute an ARMv8-based motherboard design to the Open Compute Project. Cavium claims it's the first Open Rack-compatible motherboard specification.

… Targeting small-cell deployment in mobile networks, Accedian announced it's shipping pluggable optical modules (SFP form factor) with the intelligence to turn up mobile-backhaul bandwidth at scheduled times or upon installation.

… Mirantis released Version 5.0 of its OpenStack distribution, adding support for OpenStack's Icehouse release. Mirantis also announced a partnership with Canonical to offer private-cloud technology based on Mirantis OpenStack and Ubuntu.

Finally, here's the other news we covered this past week: