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

MAKING MOVES

Edna Ganon, director of technology at MRV Communications, was nominated as the Open Networking Foundation's (ONF) Migration project chair.

SoftNAS, a cloud storage company, added Brad Pedersen, former chief architect and senior fellow at Citrix, to its board of advisors.

Ex-Alcatel-Lucent exec Andrew McDonald became senior vice president of product management at CENX.

CPlane expanded named Mike Seashols team with the appointment of Mike Seashols as its newest chairman of the board. Julie Shimer and Eric Wolford were also added to the company's advisory board.

MONEY, MONEY, MONEY. MONEY!

Amdocs agreed to buy most of Comverse’s business support systems (BSS) business unit for $272 million in cash.

Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri was quick to defend the company's recent agreement to acquire Alcatel-Lucent. In case you missed it, check out SDxCentral's extensive coverage of the colossal deal.

FireEye increased its 2015 revenue outlook to $615 million to $635 million, on the basis that more and more businesses are looking to pay a pretty penny to protect their networks from cyber threats. FireEye's previous prediction for 2015 revenue was $605 million $625 million.

Amazon acquired startup ClusterK for $20 million to $50 million, VentureBeat reported. ClusterK found a way to exploit Amazon Web Services’ Spot Instances feature to run applications more cheaply — 90 percent off the usual price in some cases, the startup claimed.

TEAMING UP

Swisscom finished its deployment of NEC and NetCracker. Swisscom can now move its business lines to the NetCracker Service Fulfillment product, allowing for advanced provisioning capabilities and faster time-to-market for new services.

Adara Networks signed Data Consultants Corporation (DCC) as a channel partner. DCC will integrate Adara's SDN services and products into its infrastructure and WAN offering, delivering WAN optimization and acceleration, among other features.

NEW RELEASES

Although we already reported on big data analytics company Jolata last week, the startup officially launched this week, divulging details of the Jolata TruFlow Platform.

OpenStack's 11th release — Kilo — is now available for download. Key new features include the first full release of Ironic, a bare-metal provisioning service that supports existing VM workloads and adoption of up-and-coming technologies like Linux containers and NFV; and, for OpenStack Neutron, the second version of a load-balancing-as-a-service API. Other additions include NFV support, Open vSwitch port security, VLAN transparency, and MTU API extensions.

THE CLOUD IS COMING

OpenCloud Connect named the winners of its debut cloud innovation contest: password security firm TapLink won the seed-funded category, and software-defined WAN startup Viptela took top honors in the late-stage pre-IPO category. (Our own Keith Griffith was one of the media judges.)

Here’s what else SDxCentral covered lately:

  • OpenCloud Connect Attempts Liftoff for Cloud Standards
  • Cloud-Managed Security Services Market Hits $7.2B
  • Google's Urs Hölzle: Containers Will Rule the Cloud
  • Cisco ACI Integrates Security from Sourcefire
  • Extreme Networks Adds Group-Based Policy to Its SDN Platform
  • Hacking Lessons From Security Compass' Battle School
  • Verizon's Carrier SDN Makeover Includes Just About Everybody
  • FireHost Picks VMware NSX Over Cisco ACI
  • Why the LSO Market Will Be Billions of Dollars
  • HP Gets Mobile with New Campus Networking Products
  • New on SDxCentral: Enhanced SDN & NFV Use Cases