Nokia joins SONiC Foundation as premier member
Nokia joined the Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) Foundation as a Premier member and placed Mirza Arifovic, Research and Development (R&D) Lead at Nokia, on the SONiC Governing Board, moves the company said were intended to support open, scalable, and AI-ready data center networking.
The SONiC Foundation operated under the Linux Foundation and maintained an ecosystem of Premier members that the press release listed as including Alibaba, Arista Networks, Broadcom, Cisco, Dell Technologies, Google, Intel, Marvell, Microsoft, Nexthop Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Nvidia; the Foundation described SONiC as an open source network Operating System (OS) for AI, cloud, and large-scale networking.
The announcement noted Nokia had contributed to SONiC since 2019 and ranked among the top five organizations for contributions. The company had delivered chassis and multi-Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) architecture implementations, Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) contributions, ARM architecture enablement, and small-footprint optimizations.
As a Premier member and with a Nokia representative on the Governing Board, the firm positioned its prior technical work within the formal governance and membership structure of the Foundation and referred to broader participation in Foundation activities.
“We are delighted to welcome Nokia as a Premier member of the SONiC Foundation,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge and Internet of Things (IoT) at the Linux Foundation. “Nokia has played a critical role in advancing SONiC from its early days to today's AI-scale deployments. Their leadership in high-performance hardware, expertise in software development and global-scale network engineering strengthens the community and accelerates the adoption of open source NOS across hyperscale, enterprise, and telecom markets.” “For the past five years, Nokia has been a proactive and committed member of the SONiC community, delivering key innovations that are now deployed at global scale in data center networks. Joining the SONiC Foundation as a Premier member builds on this proven commitment, allowing us to accelerate open source collaboration and combine the community's efforts with our high-performance hardware and modern automation solutions to power the next generation of cloud and AI infrastructure,” said Rudy Hoebeke, Vice President, Software Product Management, Nokia IP Networks Business Division.
Nokia said it planned to deepen its engagement, expand participation across working groups, expand upstream collaboration and help advance high-capacity, AI-optimized data center fabrics.