April 27, 2006 Fremont, CA -- The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) and Network Processing Forum (NPF) today announced their intent to merge. The organizations site synergies in their technical work, interests, and membership base as a key reason why this merger makes sense for their members and for the industry, reports Lightwave Senior News Editor, Meghan Fuller.
The NPF was founded in 2001 primarily to draft implementation agreements (IAs) that define communications between processing elements and between processing elements and the host processor. The forum has three major foci: 1) The development of software interfaces; 2) the development of hardware interconnection between various processor elements; and 3) the development of benchmarks against which member companies can measure their own products.
For the OIF, which focuses on specifying component interfaces primarily at the system interface level, the NPF brings value in terms of its work on interface specifications at the component or network element level. "The OIF has been interested in bringing the data networking and optical networking worlds together, has seen the value of specification at a level below networking equipment, and the NPF brings a new dimension of that work in," explains Joe Berthold, president of the OIF and vice president of network architecture at Ciena (Linthicum, MD). "The work that it is doing on software interfaces and benchmarking is work that the OIF was not doing at all before. And yet it's technology that the OIF members are using and building in their equipment," he adds.
The OIF hopes to leverage the strength of the NPF's work in benchmark creation, in particular. "The OIF has a strong interest in interoperability and driving real interoperability into products, not just viewing it as an interesting trade show event," says Berthold. "We view the work being done by the NPF, the benchmark creation, as another aspect of interoperability."
For its part, the NPF hopes to leverage strength of the OIF's 110 members to increase its visibility and reach throughout the industry. "We've worked with the OIF in the past," notes Chuck Sannipoli, chairman of the NPF and vice president and general manager of the Network Processing Division at IP Infusion (San Jose, CA). "We saw this as an opportunity to increase working group participation and breadth of input by including the folks that were in the OIF but didn't see a specific enough need to participate in the NPF directly¿but offered good ideas when we started working with them."
The NPF "cranks out a great number of implementation agreements, especially in the area of software interfaces," adds Sannipoli. Its merger with the OIF will enable the NPF to gather input from system vendors and carriers, not just the silicon and software vendors that comprise the bulk of its membership.
The idea of a merger between the two groups is not new; the OIF and NPF have enjoyed a close relationship over the past several years and have tried to collate their meetings whenever possible. The forums also have collaborated on joint development projects, particularly between the OIF's Physical Link Layer (PLL) Group and the NPF's Hardware Group.
The merged group will retain the OIF name as well as its management structure. Two new working groups will be added--a benchmarking group and a software group--to continue the NPF's work. The NPF's Hardware Group, meanwhile, will merge with the OIF's PLL Goup.
While both industry organizations say they will benefit from the merger, the industry as a whole should come out the big winner, they contend. "The closer [the NPF] work[s] with end users and system suppliers, the better our implementation agreements will be and the more used they will be," says Sannipoli. "This adds value to the industry as a whole because we will get wider participation, wider acceptance of the implementation agreements and therefore achieve greater interoperability between the component parts and the end users who actually build from those component parts."
--Meghan Fuller