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

Arista Founder: Networking Standards Move Too Slowly for Cloud Giants — Arista is trying to start a grass-roots standards effort for 800 Gb/s optics.

Juniper CTO Sindhu Stepping Aside to Focus on His Startup — Fungible hasn’t revealed what it’s working on, but it does seem to involve semiconductors.

Nokia's New Cloud Packet Core is More Than a Virtual EPC — Nokia’s new software aims to bring all the pieces of the puzzle together: the evolved packet core, a range of access technologies, and cloud capabilities.

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

Cloudera announced that Apache Spot (incubating) now acts as an open-source system that can provide analytics for security.

Ciena is introducing Blue Planet Manage, Control and Plan (MCP) to support network operators’ transformations to automated networks.

Italtel will launch its Itaca (Italtel Analytics Configurable Asset) system at Mobile World Congress 2017 to give operators a better understanding of network and delivered services.

Trend Micro is joining forces with channel partner NEC and NEC’s affiliate Netcracker. NEC and Netcracker will integrate their management and orchestration capabilities with Trend Micro’s Virtual Network Function Suite to help with network function virtualization (NFV) deployments.

Startup Rubrik announced its bookings run rate is “approaching” $100 million just three years after the company's founding. Rubrik also hired former Arista executive Mark Smith as executive VP of global sales and business development.

Qualys announced the opening of three new security operations centers in the European Union (EU), India and North America.

Fortinet picked Ixia’s testing technology to validate the performance of its recently announced FortiGate 3980E and 7060E enterprise firewalls.

Mitani Sangyo, a Japanese provider, has chosen VeloCloud's software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN).

Inmarsat announced that its low-power wide area (LoRa) WAN-based network, developed in partnership with Actility, is delivering on its strategy to roll out IoT.

PTC added ThingWorx to its Internet of Things (IoT) partner program.

Genians launched a cloud-based version of its network access control (NAC) system.

Zenoss launched its ZenPack SDK, a new portal that enables anyone to create plug-ins that extend the capabilities of the Zenoss platform.

AlienVault announced the availability of USM Anywhere, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) security platform designed to centralize threat detection, incident response, and compliance management of cloud, hybrid cloud, and on-premises environments.

Saguna and Vimmi partnered to sell a content delivery system for mobile operators based on the Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) standard.

Stratoscale acquired Tesora, a privately held database-as-a-service (DBaaS) provider to deliver DBaaS from public, private, or hybrid cloud computing platforms.

Nutanix has appointed Wendy M. Pfeiffer, former vice president of IT at GoPro, as chief information officer (CIO).

Zentera announced a multicloud security system to secure enterprise workloads by combining third-party security engines with its multicloud security service.

MegaPath picked VeloCloud to expand its SD-WAN service and provide more bandwidth.

Adara Networks and Edgecore Networks partnered to produce a portfolio of software-defined networking (SDN) and cloud systems.

Sardina Systems became a sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation.

Equinix has closed the purchase of IO UK's data center operating business in Slough, United Kingdom.

Here are the other stories SDxCentral covered this week: