Martel named “Key Innovator” by the EC’s Innovation Radar

Martel named "Key Innovator"

Martel named "Key Innovator"The European Commission’s Innovation Radar has named Martel a ‘Key Innovator’ thanks to the company’s contribution to the Open Source MANO (OSM) enhancement for flexible cloud-native service deployments, developed within the Affordable5G project.

Open Source MANO (OSM) is an Open Source community-driven management and orchestration platform for Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs). OSM is being used in the ongoing Horizon 2020 Affordable5G project as an orchestrator for Cloud to Edge, 5G centric services.

Within Affordable5G, Martel has been working alongside the OSM developers to develop a new feature, supporting the dynamic placement of Kubernetes network functions across the cloud-edge in OSM managed NFV Infrastructures. By working directly with the OSM open source community, Martel ensures that this feature becomes part of the official OSM releases, thus ensuring its long-term availability and support. This means providing a useful feature for both the Affordable5G consortium partners and the large ETSI OSM community as a whole. For this work, The European Commission’s Innovation Radar has named Martel a ‘Key Innovator.

The result announced by the European Commission’s Innovation Radar comes after a thorough analysis from independent experts involved in reviewing ongoing Research and Innovation projects funded by the EC. Their analysis recognised that the OSM enhancement addresses the needs of existing markets, placing it in the Radar’s “Exploring” market maturity category: this includes innovations actively exploring value creation opportunities, considered as ‘getting things started’. The Radar defines such innovations as being in the early phases of technological readiness, but already showing high commitment levels from the organisations developing them.

“Martel is a strong believer of community-driven open source approaches and, despite the intense efforts required to reach consensus in the community, we believe that making process compliant and community-driven contributions to open source is key to support innovation in EU companies, and to provide a sustainable pathway for European projects outcomes as we showed with Affordable5G”, said Dr Federico M. Facca, Martel’s Chief Technology Officer and Head of Martel Lab after the news that Martel was named “Key Innovator” by the EC’s Innovation Radar.

About Innovation Radar

The Innovation Radar is a European Commission initiative to identify high potential innovations and innovators in EU-funded research and innovation projects. Its goal is to allow every citizen, public official, professional and business person to discover the outputs of EU innovation funding and give them a chance to seek out innovators who could follow in the footsteps of companies such as Skype, TomTom, ARM Holdings, all of whom received EU funding in their early days.

About Affordable5G

Kicked off in early September 2020, the EU-funded project Affordable5G aims at creating a 5G network that will deliver a complete, disaggregated and affordable solution covering the needs of private and enterprise networks through technical innovation including Radio Access, Edge, 5G Core and Orchestration.