Working groups serve as ONUG’s vehicle for generating industry change. Members of the ONUG Community – IT professionals, vendors, service providers and solutions integrators – join together to address the wide range of challenges enterprises must overcome on their journey to digital transformation.

Enterprise IT application deployment in complex hybrid multi-cloud environments presents users with a wide range of entirely new technical, business and organizational challenges that present significant barriers to adoption. The ONUG Working Groups are tasked with addressing these challenges, which each working group is attacking from a different angle:

• Observability
• Security
• SD-WAN integration
• Orchestration & automation
• AIOps

Two new working groups – Orchestration & Automation and AIOPs for Hybrid Multi-Cloud – will be debuting at ONUG Fall 2019.

The working groups engage in a collaborative process that starts with enterprise IT leaders identifying the top priority use cases for typical deployment scenarios in complex hybrid multi-cloud environments. The ONUG Hybrid Multi-Cloud Steering Committee, serving in an oversight capacity, recommends the formation of a new working group when it recognizes that the challenges associated with a set of related use cases represent a significant barrier to cloud adoption for a high percentage of users in the community.

Each working group, led by IT executive co-chairs, is tasked with defining critical use case requirements, which are documented in a set of “RFPs”. These RFPs will guide vendors, service providers and solutions integrators in developing reference solutions that will serve as architectural blueprints for IT professionals charged with deploying cloud-based applications.

At ONUG events, sponsoring vendors and service providers are encouraged to present multi-vendor proof-of-concept demonstrations that comply with documented reference solution requirements that help educate IT buyers across the broader community of enterprise users. (Note that ONUG has just distributed the sponsor PoC guidelines for the ONUG Fall 2019 and ONUG Europe 2019 conferences.)

ONUG is also launching a verification testing service, which will be supported by select solutions integrators, with the goal of validating multi-vendor reference solutions to ensure that they are compliant with the use case requirements specified in RFPs.

The ONUG Community is forward-looking and focused on realizing the future state of hybrid multi-cloud adoption, powered by multi-vendor refence solutions that accelerate IT service delivery while reducing total cost of ownership. The community places high value on solutions that are open, software-defined, API-driven and allow for a choice of suppliers – vendors, cloud service providers and communications service providers.

Enterprise users benefit from the working group process by learning how to apply architectural blueprints that will simplify adoption of hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure to help drive digital transformation in their company’s business.

Vendors, service providers and solutions integrators in the community benefit by interacting directly with enterprise users to gain firsthand knowledge of the critical challenges and barriers to adoption that are driving use case requirements for multi-vendor reference solutions. 

To join a Working Group, please complete our Working Group request form.