Here are the top stories SDxCentral wrangled this week related to SDN, NFV, cloud, and virtualization infrastructure:

VMware Acquires Employees & Assets of PLUMgrid — PLUMgrid’s people are an obvious fit for VMware, as the company boasts experts in network virtualization, security, and OpenStack.

Is Cisco Falling Behind in Innovation (or Just in PR)? — Analysts say Cisco has a lot brewing, even if it doesn't seem so on the outside.

Korea Telecom Pushes for Pre-Standard 5G Network in 2017 — The Korean operator follows Verizon's lead in order to meet a hard deadline: the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang.

Here are the week’s strays and stragglers we roped for you:

Network security company Clavister announced Clavister cOS Stream 3.0 and Clavister Hawkeye 1.0 visualization software. Both are built for the new telecom networks looking to implement software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV).

ZTE is cooperating with Telefónica to jointly build a large-scale vIMS network in Latin America.

TIM took another step toward 5G, experimenting on live networks in collaboration with Altiostar's virtual Radio Access Network (vRAN) technology.

OneWeb secured $1.2 billion in capital from SoftBank to build a constellation of satellites to enable global broadband access.

Faction, an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud provider, released its Faction Internetwork eXchange (FIX), allowing enterprises to connect private cloud and colocation resources into public clouds privately and securely.

The Xen Project, which is hosted at The Linux Foundation, announced Qualcomm as an advisory board member.

Here are the other stories SDxCentral covered this week: