The open source movement continues to grow by the day as more members of the IT community begin to realize the benefits that open source solutions can provide on an individual and organizational basis. As such, projects like OpenDaylight have attracted numerous big-name companies looking to leverage the power of the open source community to improve their own software-defined networking and network virtualization software solutions in addition to garnering goodwill from customers at large.

AT&T (T), ClearPath Networks and Nokia Networks are the latest companies to pledge their support for the OpenDaylight Project to build the ultimate open source SDN and NFV platform. Each company will use it specific areas of expertise to contribute to the project and further the progress of the open source community.

“As NFV and SDN rapidly converge, ClearPath intends to extend its virtualized CPE (vCPE) platform to exploit SDN,” said Marc Cohn, senior vice president of Marketing at ClearPath Networks, in a statement. “With the momentum generated by OpenDaylight over the past year surging, we are eager to leverage the numerous benefits of open source and contribute back to the community.”

AT&T said it has utilized OpenDaylight since the project launched in 2013 and uses the project to advance its Network on Demand capabilities. The telecom giant also plans to submit its YANG Design Studio Tool into open source via the OpenDaylight community to allow developers to use the AT&T software-defined framework and YANG-driven implementation.

“Open source will speed up our innovation, lower costs and help us virtualize 75 percent of our network by 2020,” said John Donovan, senior executive vice president of AT&T Technology and Operations. “Collaborating with and contributing to the open source community is crucial to drive this software shift at AT&T and in the industry.”

Broadband infrastructure provider Nokia Networks said it will utilize the OpenDaylight Project to flesh out its telecom cloud deployments.

“The future of networks is in distributed architecture and cloud platforms that enable full use of NFV and SDN,” said Henri Tervonen, vice president of Mobile Broadband Architecture at Nokia Networks. “We are excited to shape the future together with the OpenDaylight community, which gives us further opportunities to drive the industry toward openness and collaboration.” 

The third release of OpenDaylight, called Lithium, launched in June. This week also marked the second OpenDaylight Summit in California, where The Linux Foundation held a developers’ conference for the upcoming fourth release of the project, called Beryllium, which is due in February.