By establishing common specifications, the NPF enables equipment manufacturers to significantly reduce their design burden, while having the flexibility to use the best components to fit their requirements. The organization was formed to build on the efforts of two former industry groups, the Common Programming Interface Forum (CPIX) and the Common Switch Interface Consortium (CSIX), by delivering specifications for programmable network elements that reduce equipment time-to-market, while dramatically increasing time-in-market.
Over the past few years, System OEMs have been under intense pressure from their small, medium and large enterprise and worldwide communications service provider customers to deliver solutions that cost-effectively and quickly enabled the delivery of new competitive features and services at faster speeds. In addition to being cost-effective and quick, customers wanted these new capabilities without having to do significant hardware upgrades or make major changes to their existing networks. This environment created significant demand for more flexible and adaptable networking solutions that could be brought to market quickly and cost-effectively. In order to meet these new requirements, industry entrepreneurs combined the programmability of microprocessors with the dedicated speed and performance of ASICs to create a new series of networking products called network processors. These early developments led to a whole new industry dedicated to developing new networking solutions based on network processing technologies.