 Welcome everybody, and welcome to the Open Networking and Edge Executive Forum. From last year's success, we've even made it a bigger event. We exceeded the registration and we are really excited that all of you could join. I'm your host, Arpad Joshpura, here at the Linux Foundation, and I will walk you through some of the high level happenings in the open source world. But before we go there, let me cover some of the logistics of this virtual event. It's three days, three time zones, three hours. It's live and content is not repeated across three zones. So just keep that in mind. I have some basic housekeeping rules for everybody. Please abide by the Linux Foundation Code of Conduct. So utilize the Q&A box and ask questions of our speakers, right? All speakers are live. They'll take a few Q&A based on based on time. Remember, we get this opportunity once a year to ask executives and most of the presentations are really around what's happening, what are the priorities, what are the call to actions for our community, a five to 10 year vision. So just keep that in mind. If there's a logistic question or, you know, event related, you have the email, events.netbooking.org. Now we are starting today to accommodate the West Coast and East Coast and more NAEU friendly. Tomorrow we're starting in the evening Pacific time to accommodate our APAC friendly time zones and then obviously Thursday we're starting very early on the Pacific Coast for the EU time zone. So keep in mind, you're welcome to join all three. In fact, I would recommend you join all three days to get a full flavor of the global ecosystem. And, you know, as I said, none of the content will be repeated. So with that, let me get started and walk you through the state of open networking and edge. As always, everybody wants to know what's the buzz in the open ecosystem, and the buzz falls in three categories. Security, the re-aggregation, meaning coming together of multiple things, and what's the next big thing or things. So let me cover each of these in the short timeframe I have. The fundamental buzz this year has been around open source security, and it's in high gear. It's in high gear because there has been research done, there has been analysis done, there are tools in place, and fundamentally the ecosystem has come to a conclusion that open source is more secure than a proprietary stack. And so we at the Linux Foundation are working together with multiple leaders in this space to help shape this security aspects of open source. So let's start off with a few very important research and surveys that have been done in this space. Now I know you cannot see the left hand side and that's on purpose. These are infographics from a survey done by LF research. I want you to download this survey. But the call outs on the survey says 90% of the community is using open source or wants to, but it's there, open source is everywhere. Almost everybody is concerned about security, and only half of those are using what is called S-bombs or software build-up materials, right, and I'll talk about that in a bit. So there's some work to be done, but security is very important given that open source is proliferating in almost all the aspects of what we do. There's a second research done by Linux Foundation, OpenSSF, and Harvard. And again, you cannot see it and that's by intent because I would like you to download this. And what research is essentially saying that security is not a plug-on or a tool, it is the entire software development life cycle that's important. And it's not just CVEs and vulnerability management. Packaging, integration, everything are part of the security and supply chain. And you have to focus on the top projects within the domain to determine the criticality of security. So connectivity for us in the networking space is going to be the center of attraction. So we just have to be very clear on that. Okay. So what do we do about it, right? So what we do is we kind of have this ability to put a framework in place for open source projects, right? We have a foundation wide framework where we can take six actions and the actions, as I said, are from end to end, a developer to a consumer. We identify the most important critical components that need to be secure because not everything can be 100% secure. You identify and automate tooling. You identify what is delivered in the CI CD and the life cycle, specifically around training. You identify the packages that come as a result of building the entire stack. Then you track the S-bombs as we call it, software build of material, right? The package name and etc. And then you obviously customize your research. So this is the general framework that we are applying to pretty much all of the open source projects. And then getting it back into the networking umbrella, let's look at how we are going to visualize it. So under the LFX tool that has been so popular in the industry, Linux Foundation Networking and Linux Foundation Edge as projects and as umbrellas have been used as an example of or a leading example of how security should be done. Primarily, we all know that if there is no connectivity, there is nothing. So this is the critical aspects of not just our infrastructure, but our global reach and our global support for the community, right? Whether it's end users, whether it's enterprises, whether it's governments, whether it's cloud, right? So here's an example of how we are going to track display, monitor, manage and provide more security to open source projects within Linux Foundation. If you need to know more detail, we are announcing a new white paper, releasing a new white paper today on security. It gives you that framework. It gives you the analysis. It gives you the ability to sort of participate. And I would say if you're joining for the first time, please join workgroups, task force, security committees. There is nothing you don't have to be a designer or developer. You could be anything and you can still participate and not only gain value but contribute back to the ecosystem. So open source security is the first bus. The second bus is re-aggregation in the open. And what do I mean by re-aggregation, right? Everybody has heard disaggregation, right? Separation of control plane from data plane, you know, separate hardware from software. All of that kind of the last 10 years has seen tremendous, tremendous value. Well, it's time to re-aggregate, but this is a different level of re-aggregation. It's a re-aggregation of communities, organizations, so standards, alliances, other open source foundations and projects, right? As these open source projects mature, how do you pull it together? So before I go into the specifics, I came across this extremely interesting infographics, which basically says over the last several decades, how does the economics of creativity work, right? In terms of both monetary value and the value to the society. And you can see some of the technology evolutions, right? Whether it's music or games or whatever. But the two I want to point out is software design has stuck out significantly. And what's coming up big is community building. And that's what we do. Community building on open source software. So that's where, you know, collaboration and re-aggregation of communities are very important. Okay, I just thought this was quite interesting because it's so relevant to what we do. And so to show how communities come together, we measure and we measure and we make sure that that we can grow. Here's some examples of networking edge and access projects, right? All the way from the packet core, which is magma to edge to data plane acceleration, to a lot of networking, a NOS, DENT and ORAN software, right? All the way out the stack, huge growth in terms of, you know, contributor strengths. And again, this is the scale is anywhere from three years to obviously DPDK is 10 years old. Everywhere from that range. So really good contributions. We have really doubled down on our collaboration with standards, alliances and specifications, as well as other open source foundations. You can see a check mark on pretty much everything that we have been doing here at the Linux Foundation because standards and open source alliances and open source need to work together to provide and use a value. So we've said that from day one, and we are doubling down on that. And to be to be a very fair we are seeing increased collaboration across these foundations. You'll hear from, say, GSMA and NGMN on Thursday. And, you know, we're excited to have a lot of other foundations represented through our members as well. Okay. So here comes the re-aggregation of projects. And this is a very popular open source project re-aggregation diagram that we have been using. But this is how projects from an end to end perspective come together. And it doesn't have to be, you know, within Linux Foundation, it could be outside, it could be your own, you know, multiple types. If someone says I need an end to end stack from edge access enterprise all the way to the core, how do I build it? Here's an example. And so what the community has done is it has launched an initiative we announced it last year at this event called 5G Super Blueprints, which is, you know, super as in, it's like sort of the umbrella blueprints. And the team started working on it. It's very popular. If you're not participating, you're missing out. And what the team's doing in an open way is aggregating components of the software sub system in an open banner so that people can add it and reproduce it. And they're testing it in real labs. So I'm pleased to report that integrations between several key projects have been complete, right? Whether it's ONAP and Open Daylight, ONAP and some version of Magma, Anuket and ONAP, MCO, et cetera. And we're working to get some of these moved into the RAN aspects of things. So clearly, huge progress. There are case studies under development that will have real deployments of 5G Super Blueprints. But keep in mind, if you're an end user, you just download and deploy and you're ready to go, right? If you're a contributing partner, you can take this and harden it for, you know, providing value to your end customer. It's just the work has become simpler. And the goal of this whole blueprint is to speed up innovation. So we also issued a press release today on the whole security as well as the Super Blueprint momentum. We welcome some of the new members that have joined the Linux Foundation Networking recently to provide help on an end to end manner from core to edge. So this is really exciting. And we are, you know, extremely happy to report on the progress. And the final buzz are what's the next big thing or things, right? And before I get into the next big things, let's just take a moment to recognize what I keynoted last year in terms of the next big thing for the next year, right? Hindsight 2020. It was all 5G. It was all cloud native. It was all Edge. And please to report what's making headlines, right? You know, some of the articles that have gained coverage, you can see, you know, a few examples on North America, right? You can see a few examples on APAC. You can see a few examples on EMEA. All of these point to huge support and movement around specifically 5G, around specifically open source and things that move into the RAN infrastructure. Okay. So what's, what does it mean? And I had this slide last year, and it's getting a lot more traction this year, and we are kind of looking at two major next big things, if you may. There is a lot of work going on in the Gnosis, if you may. So the disaggregation or the separation of SDN, control plane, data plane kind of, you know, this is mainstream. If you look into either the cloud data centers or even enterprise data centers or telecom data centers, there is a need to get into the separation of sort of hardware and software at the Linux kernel level, right? So, you know, on Gnosis-like, then Dursonic or Deynos or things like that. And then obviously the rest of the industry this year is extremely focused on ORAN, which is really the opening up of the last piece of the puzzle, if you may, beyond edge for the entire telecommunication system. So that's kind of the high level thing. And then obviously no keynote will be complete without talking about 6G. And while 5G is going through its implementation phase, we're starting to see 6G requirements emerge, right, whether it's use cases or whether it's the specifications on data rates, capacity, latency, etc., etc. And then what we are starting to see is the edge compute even moving to mainstream. And one interesting fact I want to point out, there's a Mackenzie study that came out on digital transformation and digitalization index. And it is very interesting because if you look at the left, I'm sure you can't read this, but the green is really the verticals that on the top that are ready for digitalization, right? So the networking, telecom, ICT world, the media world, the financial world, trade manufacturing, oil and gas utilities. And then the red at the bottom is more markets that have a slow to adapt digital transformation, agriculture, construction, hospitality, healthcare, etc. Now keep in mind, I want to point, the reason I'm bringing this up is digital transformation is also enabling and using and taking advantage of edge computing. They seem to go hand in hand. Or I could even flip it around and say edge computing is speeding up digital transformation, right? Because as we mentioned last time, the markets on the top, manufacturing, energy, commerce, retail, home, etc. It's a linear list of prioritization of where edge is relevant and how things all come together. So we're really excited that we are moving with the market and we are really looking forward to the participation from you all. So with that said, I'm going to wrap and remind everybody, ask questions. You have a once a year opportunity with the top 30 thought leaders in the industry. These are leaders who are movers and shakers of the actual global networking and edge industries, right? And, you know, when you listen to them, you know, ask questions. Of course, nothing is complete without a few announcements. So stay tuned for some few announcements over the next three days. And if you want to participate, like there was one of the questions already that have come in. Here's a new website for networking. Go get started, right? Just there's a button, how do you get started? So take a look. And with that, welcome to Onif. And I am very excited that you are all here. I'm going to be the host. So I'll pop in and out as needed, as required. And with that said, we have a fantastic, fantastic schedule today. We look at the first half of Onif through the break. We have some of the largest end users from North America, right? We have everybody, including US governments and telecoms and infrastructure and users and things like that. So listen on what they need. After the break, we move to Edge and IoT. And then we wrap with our cloud. And so if you can see how, you know, cloud, Edge, enterprise and telecom, they all come together because the building blocks are the same. Okay. And with that said, I am going to invite our first speaker.