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

Verizon Joins ONAP — It's quite amazing, considering that at least half the ONAP code is derived from a project of AT&Ts.

AT&T's Mansfield Says Mobile 5G Launch Plan is Aggressive but Not Impossible —5G uses the underlying LTE control plane, making it faster to deploy.

Mavenir Introduces White Box Routing at the Network Edge — It will help wireless operators resolve some of the capacity constraints and latency issues in their networks.

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

Comcast selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred public cloud infrastructure provider.

Qualcomm wrote a letter to its shareholders asking them to re-elect its existing board in an effort to continue to block Broadcom.

Shipping company Maersk and IBM formed a partnership to build a global trade digitization platform, built on open standards and blockchain.

Ericsson released a small cell — the 5G Radio Dot — designed to meet 5G requirements for indoor mobile broadband.

Google will open new regions in the first quarter of 2018 including the Netherlands, Montreal, Los Angeles, Finland, and Hong Kong regions.

Qualcomm received approval from the European Commission and the Korea Fair Trade Commission to acquire NXP Semiconductors.

VMware released general availability of NSX for vSphere 6.4.

C3 IoT, an IoT and artificial intelligence (AI) software provider, raised $100 million led by existing investors.

Sprint entered into a multi-year business agreement with Cox Communications to leverage each others' networks.

Radisys updated its virtualized MediaEngine platform to support a broader range of environments and to increase Intel architecture capacity.

Extreme Networks was selected to provide the WiFi network for Super Bowl LII.

Palo Alto Networks launched its Cyber Range initiative to help customers improve their cybersecurity skills. It opened its first facility for the initiative in Amsterdam.

Arrow Electronics will collaborate with AT&T at the carrier's IoT Foundry in Plano, Texas.

Google introduced a security center for G Suite to provide businesses with security analytics.

Limelight Networks, digital content delivery infrastructure provider, and Tencent Cloud Infrastructure partnered to offer Limelight’s content delivery network (CDN) in China.

Baffle, an application data protection startup, closed $6 million in Series A funding led by Envision Ventures.

Spirent, a test and validation company, and Ethernet/IP switching provider Centec Networks completed a joint network transmission rate test for the 5G era.

Hybrid Cloud infrastructure service providers Unitas raised $10 million in a funding round, led by Boathouse Capital.

Bricata, a network security provider, released a new network dashboard capability for security operations centers.

EdgeConneX, a global software-defined data center (SDDC) company, will open an edge SDDC in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a new region of South America for the company.

Google launched an online program for people heading into IT support roles, called the Google IT Support Professional Certificate.

Cadence Design Systems, a design automation software and engineering company, deployed Platform9’s open cloud infrastructure solution to transition from its legacy IT environment.

Portnox launched its global partner program, Portnox Sphere, to offer its network visibility to more diverse enterprises.

The security company FireEye acquired X15 Software for its next generation big data management platform.

Palo Alto Networks launched its cloud infrastructure-based Logging Service in Europe.

Here are the other stories SDxCentral covered this week:

  • HPE and Portworx Tap Kubernetes for Stateful Container Storage Config
  • Tax Holiday Promises a Happy Earnings Season for Some Tech Companies
  • Will Verizon's Fixed 5G Offering Be a True Networks Slice?
  • Kaminario Ditches Hardware, Goes All in on SD-Storage
  • Chicago Bears Win Big with Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)
  • Cradlepoint Moves its LTE-Focused Software-defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) to Subscription Model
  • ZeroStack Adds Monitoring, Alerts to 'Self-Driving' Cloud Infrastructure Platform
  • Telia Will Use Nokia's Cloud Infrastructure Packet Core
  • John Chambers Keeps Retirement Interesting, Forms VC Firm
  • VMware Updates Container Platform but Remains High on virtual machine (VM) Control
  • Mavenir Introduces White Box Routing at the Network Edge
  • 15 Top Software and Tech Execs to Follow on Twitter
  • Veeam Pays $42.5M for N2WS, Plots AWS Cloud Infrastructure Backup Domination
  • Former Sigfox Exec Blames Management Differences on Departure
  • AT&T XGS-PON Field Trial Boosts ONAP Network Control
  • NS1 Adds Security Capabilities, Takes on 'DNS Cache Poisoning' Attacks
  • ETSI Zero-Touch Group Gets to Work on Future Networks, Service Management
  • Google Kubernetes Engine Will Integrate Latest 1.9 Update
  • Security Startup Arctic Wolf Raises $49M for SOC Services
  • Apcela Preps for What's Next with Funding and New President
  • U.S. Congressman Bashes ZTE and Huawei in New Bill
  • ParkMyCloud Automates Multi-cloud infrastructure Cost Control
  • Telefónica and Huawei Provide Optical Clarity with Transport SDN Lab Test
  • Pivotal Commware Touts Holographic Beamforming as 5G Coverage Tool
  • IBM 'Redeploys' CFO, Reportedly Plans to Reassign 30% of Workforce