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This spring marked a return to face-to-face meetings for MEF staff, which provided time to reconnect with members and industry colleagues. If we could sum up our conversations and meetings in one word, it’s Automation. Here are a few highlights from our travels.
Layer123 Reunion: Madrid, Spain
MEF participated in the Layer 123 Reunion: Intelligent Network Automation Congress in late April. This event brought together the network automation community to share developments and exchange knowledge on both the business drivers and new technologies and applications for network automation throughout the presentations, panels, and exhibits.
Pascal Menezes, MEF CTO, presented a keynote session “Digital Transformation, Supply Chains, and the Role of Automation.” In this presentation Pascal discussed the evolution of telecommunications in the digital transformation economy and the critical role automation plays in business workflow with optimized ecosystem delivery models.
In addition, Pascal was on hand to receive the Network Automation Recognition award for Best Contributions to Open Networking Standards & Open Source. The award was presented to MEF for its SD-WAN standards framework, the industry’s first SD-WAN managed services standard, and its pioneering security standards based on the emerging SASE Services and Zero Trust frameworks.
Key takeaways from Layer123 Reunion:
- Service providers relying on manual processes is a thing of the past. Automation is a must have via standardized APIs and blockchain.
- Most service providers want to move to a hyperscale model and become cloud native. This includes Kubernetes, orchestrated containers and server-based hardware such as CPUs, GPUs and DPUs (smart NICs).
MEF Q2 Members Meeting: Paris, France
MEF marked the return to face-to-face meetings in more than two years with its Q2 Members Meeting in Paris. MEF members participated in the an engaging opening plenary, which featured thought leadership keynotes and interactive panels on SD-WAN, SASE, and automation. Also announced in Paris, the newly formed MEF Technology Advisory Board (TAB), comprised of senior executives from leading technology companies, held its first meeting with MEF’s board of directors to kick off their collective work to strengthen industry collaboration and accelerate enterprise digital transformation.
On 4 May during the members meeting, MEF hosted its first-ever LSO Partner Conference, a one-day dual-stream interactive event that brought together business leaders and implementers from service provider, cloud, and technology companies to meet and network with buyers and sellers in the LSO Sonata community. Participants heard business and technical perspectives from industry leaders driving LSO adoption, and learned about the LSO API roadmap, and adoption and implementation resources.
Closing out the week, MEF members were treated to a beautiful dinner cruise along the Seine River courtesy of host sponsor Orange, and had the opportunity to participate in numerous committee working sessions for MEF services standards, certification, and automation projects.
ITW: Washington D.C.
Now in its fifteenth year, ITW 2022 brought together over 5,500 global leaders and decision makers from 1,800+ companies and more than 130 countries. The agenda consisted of three tracks—Digital Transformation, Infrastructure, and ESG (environmental, social, and governance)—providing opportunities to learn about the latest developments impacting the ICT industry.
MEF engaged with over 35 companies, with conversations centering on LSO Sonata APIs used to automate business functions between service providers. The key takeaway from the meetings is there is strong and growing momentum worldwide for adoption of LSO Sonata APIs. MEF forecasts as many as 60 service providers could be in production with LSO Sonata APIs by the end of 2024, and the conversations helped confirm those projections.
It has become clear that wholesale providers looking to sell Carrier Ethernet services have increasing incentive to adopt LSO Sonata APIs to automate serviceability, quoting, and ordering for buyers. This trend initially is prevalent in non-US markets, but in coming quarters will see US growth, as a growing number of buy/sell partners look for standardized API-driven automation to accelerate service delivery and time to revenue.
Key takeaways from ITW:
- MEF LSO Sonata automation APIs are key to simplifying inter-provider ICT commerce.
- There’s growing interest in extending LSO APIs to the enterprise to simplify ICT buying from service providers.
- MEF continues to provide relevant and actionable insight allowing service providers to better execute ICT modernization programs.
Learn More
Learn more about MEF LSO APIs for automation.
Catch MEF at upcoming industry events and stayed tuned for more information about its upcoming Annual Meeting in Denver, 25-28 July.
Tags: zero trust, SD-WAN, business automation, LSO Sonata, carrier ethernet, industry events