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

Cisco Launches Open vRAN Initiative — India’s Reliance Jio is the only carrier involved in the Cisco group.

VMware Adds SD-WAN, Hybrid Cloud Support to Telco NFV Platform  — VMware also plans to integrate container management into the NFV platform.

Verizon Will Make vRAN a Reality — The operator is working with Nokia and Intel on its vRAN 2.0 architecture.

There were lots of strays and stragglers this week, folks, due to the Mobile World Congress 2018 event in Barcelona, Spain:

Cisco and Italian service provider TIM started a business and innovation program for cybersecurity, the Internet of Things (IoT), smart cities, and 5G. Cisco and Vodafone jointly demonstrated network slicing via segment routing at MWC 2018. Cisco and Reliance Jio developed a mobile content delivery network (CDN), a new use case for their partnership on mobile-access edge computing (MEC). Cisco signed an agreement with Telenor to collaborate on data analysis, IoT, smart cities, and security. The Three Group released global availability of the Cisco Jasper control center automated IoT connectivity platform. UAE-based telco provider du will collaborate with Cisco on IP core network modernization and expansion.

Huawei launched its intent-driven network software to help enterprises build digital network platforms. HKT and Huawei jointly established the digital transformation practice center in Hong Kong for collaboration on end-to-end digital transformation projects.

Affirmed Networks will be a provider of a virtualized GiLAN software and a system integrator of Turkish mobile provider Turkcell. Softbank selected Affirmed Networks’ mobile content cloud to supply its enterprise customers with IoT services and mobile connectivity. Three UK chose Affirmed Networks’ service awareness and virtual probe and analytics technology for its mobile network. du selected Affirmed Networks’ NFV narrow band IoT (NB-IoT) to enable smart city use cases.

Ericsson extended its partnership Equinix to offer end-to-end IT managed services across Equinix’s data centers. TIM and Ericsson began the virtualization of TIM’s nationwide radio access network (RAN) in Italy. NTT DoCoMo selected Ericsson to automate the deployment of Ericsson’s virtual infrastructure manager platform and OpenStack-based cloud execution environment at its commercial sites in Japan.

VMware launched new edge computing technology for asset management and smart surveillance.

ZTE debuted a full series of 5G base stations. ZTE launched a 2/3/4/5G fully-integrated common core platform based on the 3GPP service-based architecture. ZTE entered a partnership with mobile operator VOO Belgium to provision a fully-virtualized mobile core and other digital transformation services. ZTE launched a real-time orchestrator that supports end-to-end network slicing. ZTE and the Belarussian subsidiary of the Telekom Austria Group velcom debuted a fully virtualized core network, completing the project in nine months.

Actility released upgrade 5.0 of its industrial IoT connectivity platform with new security features, low power wide area network (LoRaWAN) roaming support, and integration with the 3GPP IoT standards.

NoviFlow and Barefoot Networks combined a network monitoring system and a cybersecurity framework.

Vodafone selected NEC/Netcracker’s hybrid operations management for domain orchestration. VodafoneZiggo chose Netscout’s network functions virtualization (NFV) assurance technology to support its NFV transformation. Vodafone Italy and Nokia began work on a city-wide 5G network trial in Milan, Italy.

Netcracker launched its 5G monetization technology to accelerate the commercialization of 5G services.

Telco Systems added Marvell’s Armada 8040 system-on-chip to its universal CPE ecosystem.

Cavium and the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) partnered to expand the functionality of OpenCellular LTE base stations, with participation from Nokia and BT.

Sprint orchestrated a virtualized mobile core network on containers running on Cavium servers in Packet’s public cloud. Sprint purchased 5G-ready massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology from Samsung.

Lumina Networks and NoviFlow jointly demonstrated SD-Core, using MPLS and segment-based forwarding plane built to scale large MPLS networks.

Netronome and Red Hat partnered to further enhance the Linux and OpenStack communities.

Metaswitch integrated its core network software with HPE’s virtual network functions and management platforms for end-to-end virtualized communication services. Metaswitch and Cloudify partnered to automate NFV management and orchestration (MANO) for global operators.

Fujitsu will provide NTT Docomo base station hardware for the telco provider to launch commercial 5G by 2020. Fujitsu integrated the Ensemble (a division of AVDA) orchestrator and connector in its EMEIA managed network services portfolio.

ADVA, BT, and Mavenir will collaborate on a cloud RAN technologies for the TIP.

Coriant will integrate its software-defined network platform with Aricent’s network functions virtualization (NFV) MANO framework to maximize virtualization benefits.

Adtran demonstrated its CORD-based (central office re-architected as a data center) fiber access capabilities on Coriant’s multi-domain controller at MWC 2018.

ECI launched a product for an intelligent connectivity fabric for 5G networks as part of its elastic services platform.

NXP Semiconductors released a management suite for secure edge computing. NXP integrated its system-on-chip platforms with Microsoft Azure IoT edge.

Express Logic’s IoT platform now delivers connectivity and turnkey support for leading cloud providers, including AWS, Alibaba, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and more.

JMA Wireless released its extensible RAN (XRAN) platform, with RAN functions for LTE mobilty and IoT connectivity.

Asocs demonstrated its ONAP-compliant fully virtualized base station and automated lifecycle management and orchestration capabilities at MWC 2018.

InfoVista and Nuage Networks partnered to create an application-centric software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) platform.

Ethernity Networks demonstrated the traffic aggregation and integration of carrier Ethernet on a NFV platform at the network edge.

Packet Host expanded its bare-metal cloud to Interxion’s data center campus in Marseille, France.

Radcom released its cloud-native network visibility software to general availability.

Keysight Technologies and the Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute jointly demonstrated a 3GPP release 15 5G base station reference design. Keysight launched 5G new radio (NR) signal creation and analysis software tools, and tested its 5G millimeter wave (mmWave) over-the-air hardware.

Western Digital Corporation released two non-volatile memory express solid state drives (NVMe SSDs) for emerging implementations, such as IoT and edge computing.

Demisto released the newest version of its security operations platform to improve efficiency and response time.

TrackNet open sourced its firmware updates over-the-air (FUTOA) portion of its LoRaWAN stack.

CloudGenix won an SD-WAN contract with North Carolina-based Members Credit Union.

Avast launched its IoT security platform.

Inseego debuted its IoT and mobile portfolio of technology for service providers and enterprise customers.

Radwin collaborated with Intel and Facebook to release its 60sdGHz self-organizing wireless mmWave mesh technology.

Atos and Senet integrated Atos’ IoT security suite and Senet’s LoRaWAN cloud-based IoT network connectivity platforms.

Ribbon launched a unified communication component to its analytics-based security portfolio.

Core Network Dynamics released the newest version of its multi-access core network software with added support for NB-IoT, LTE-M, LoRa, IoT, and Industrial IoT use cases.

Exfo acquired 97.44 percent of the shares of Astellia, a performance analysis company.

Amdocs released AmdocsONE, a cloud-native DevOps deployment platform.

Allot Communications debuted its security platform for communications service providers.

T-Systems signed an agreement to resell and integrate Coronet’s autonomous security platform for its customers.

D-Link offered its customers free upgrade of its access and aggregation layer switches with new support for SDN.

Nakivo released a beta version of its backup and replication software with virtual machine recovery for VMware, Hyper-V, and AWS.

Here are the other stories SDxCentral covered this week: