SAN JOSE, Calif. — You have to hand it to AT&T’s public relations team. When AT&T introduced its Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management, and Policy (ECOMP) platform in March, it was announced by John Donovan, AT&T’s chief strategy officer, in a keynote address, kicking off the Open Network Summit (ONS).

Today, the last day of the Layer123 NFV World Congress, when most people had already left, Gagan Puranik, Verizon’s director of SDN/NFV architecture planning, briefly mentioned Verizon’s recently published SDN-NFV Reference Architecture document.

Verizon co-authored the document with Cisco, Ericsson, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Intel, Nokia, Red Hat, and Samsung Electronics America, according to a Verizon spokeswoman in an email to SDxCentral.

“We’ve taken ETSI and ONF [Open Networking Foundation] lingo and put it in a Verizon world,” said Puranik. “Multiple vendors have helped us put this together. It took us multiple months, internally. We have an architecture council.”

Puranik also provided a link to a Verizon webpage about its software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) efforts.

The SDN-NFV Reference Architecture addresses the impact of SDN and NFV technology on the carrier network, including areas such as provisioning, capacity planning, key performance indicators (KPIs), infrastructure service, and security, according to the Verizon spokeswoman.

The document builds on industry-developed architectures and focuses on these key points:

  • Architecture to integrate SDN and NFV to create and operate new end-to-end services
  • Architecture to design and operate a hybrid network with both physical and virtual network functions
  • Security considerations for operations in the SDN and NFV environment
  • Hardware and software KPIs and predictive analytics

Puranik said Verizon is active with ETSI, OpenStack, ONF, ONOS, TMForum, OpenDaylight, MEF, and 3GPP.

In his brief talk today he said, “We are in the midst of a major network transformation.”

He stressed that the company wants to move to white-box hardware. He said next-generation applications, such as drones, require extremely low latency, so Verizon is looking at mobile edge computing to deliver on that need.

Finally, Puranik told the vendor community that Verizon wants it to deliver micro releases, and he told SDxCentral after the talk that micro releases are basically the same as continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD).

Earlier this month, SDxCentral broke the news that Verizon is adding 16 data centers to its telco cloud in 2016.