Here are the top stories SDxCentral wrangled this week related to SDN, NFV, 5G, IoT, containers, cloud, and more: 

Silver Peak Could Be the Next Big SD-WAN Acquisition Target — According to research from IHS Markit, software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) software revenue is up 2.8 times year-over-year.

OpenStack Launches Open Source 'Kata Containers' Project — The goal of the project is to unite the security advantages of virtual machines with the speed and manageability of containers.

Barefoot Networks Plunges Into Network Monitoring — The new system leverages the Tofino programmable switch chip along with analytics software.

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

Following Broadcom's attempt at a hostile takeover of Qualcomm, the chipmaker issued a statement rebuffing the offer.

Vodafone and Softbank signed a strategic alliance to enhance commercial and operational support for Vodafone’s multinational enterprise customers in Japan.

VeloCloud extended its cloud-delivered SD-WAN to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

ETSI launched a new industry specification group to synchronize efforts and work on Augmented Reality (AR).

AT&T partnered with AWS to introduce a number of new Internet of Things (IoT) assets, including an LTE-M button and certificates on SIM.

6Wind expanded its Brocade vRouter replacement program through the first half of 2018.

Data cloud platform and management company, Iguazio, debuted its open source, multicloud serverless platform. The company also opened its Asia Pacific regional headquarters in Singapore.

Canonical partnered with Rancher Labs to build a turnkey application delivery platform built on Ubuntu, Kubernetes, and Rancher 2.0.

Oracle released the most recent version of Flexcube, its flagship core banking application, with new blockchain and machine learning adapters.

Red Hat launched general availability of its OpenShift Application Runtimes.

Mellanox partnered with NEC to launch artificial intelligence platforms for high performance and deep learning data centers.

Container-Native CI/CD platform Codefresh announced support of Helm Charts in its platform.

Virtual Instruments, an infrastructure performance management company, released the newest version of its analytics platform, VirtualWisdom.

A cloud-native data management company, Kasten, released its first platform, K10, to build, deploy, and manage containerized applications.

Portworx, which runs stateful containers, says the newest release of its PX-Enterprise software can run Red Hat’s OpenShift container platform and Google Container Engine (GKE).

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) provider, Virtuozzo released the most recent version of its integrated container, hypervisor, and storage platform.

A new report from IDC forecasts that “whole cloud” revenue will reach $554 billion in 2021.

Aspen Technology, an asset optimization software company, acquired the Cipher Industrial Internet of Things software and edge connectivity assets of the Canadian company RtTech Software.

Database monitoring company, Influx Data added support for Kubernetes auto-scaling on the most recent version of its open source platform.

SD-WAN provider Bigleaf Networks upgraded its cloud-access network with a new speed package.

The security company Preempt expanded its product suite with a new adaptive threat prevention platform.

Here are the other stories SDxCentral covered this week: