LSO Sonata

MEF’s LSO API Framework provides a set of SDKs released every six months that contain APIs, tools, documentation, and underlying standards for service automation across providers, between providers and enterprises, and within providers.

• LSO SDK repositories are publicly available on GitHub and use GitHub teams as a communication channel.
• Extended SDK versions are available exclusively for MEF members. They contain work-in-progress elements and pre-release standards.
• Members can contact the LSO Developer Community Manager, community_manager@mef.net, and visit LSO Sonata SDK on the MEF Wiki for more information.

Consider the case of a large enterprise customer with data centers and branch offices located around the world. This customer is looking for a service provider to provide connectivity to all their locations. No single service provider has facilities to reach all customer locations. Typically, a service provider can reach some of the locations (on-net locations) but must work with a set of partners to reach the other locations (off-net locations).

The interaction between service providers and partners to deliver services to a single customer may involve proprietary APIs and portals but is predominantly manual across the industry – involving emails, spreadsheets, negotiations, etc. – resulting in long time periods and costs to set up required connectivity. Accelerating these processes through automation provides cost savings and greater business value to the end customer. It also removes much of the potential error inherent in manual processes.

With hundreds of service providers and partners in the world, it would be prohibitively expensive and time consuming to implement custom automation for each service provider–partner pair. MEF’s LSO Sonata APIs provide an industry standard so that a service provider (buyer) may implement these APIs and automatically work with all their LSO Sonata-enabled partners. Similarly, a partner (seller) may implement these APIs, enabling automation with their LSO Sonata-enabled partner service providers.

The top three LSO Sonata benefits identified by service providers are: (1) accelerate service delivery, (2) accelerate time to revenue, and (3) improve customer experience and loyalty. More than two-thirds of 28 service providers surveyed by MEF described these benefits as having “high value.”

Other significant benefits include efficiencies that lead to additional revenue from new orders with API-enabled partners, scaling with predictability, reduced operational expenses, and the potential for new revenue from multi-provider on-demand services.

At a strategic level, implementation of LSO Sonata APIs enables service providers to participate in an emerging global networking federation with frictionless commerce. Federation participation will ultimately create an opportunity to provide higher margin, highly differentiated dynamic services across multiple providers that leave behind low-margin fixed-bandwidth services.

A large and growing number of service providers worldwide are embracing LSO Sonata APIs to automate business functions between providers. The pace of the transition to the APIs has picked up significantly with the latest “Billie” LSO SDK Release in June 2021.

Recent research from MEF indicates that at least 30 companies are either in production with LSO Sonata or intend to be by the end of 2023, including 24 companies by the end of June 2022. Twenty-nine companies have implemented LSO Sonata or intend to as a seller, and 14 have implemented LSO Sonata or intend to as a buyer. These numbers are likely to increase as market awareness grows and buyers increasingly call upon their seller partners to align to LSO Sonata APIs.

MEF is closely tracking LSO Sonata adoption through one-to-one engagement with MEF member and non-member companies.

Fourteen companies in production with LSO Sonata APIs as of October 2021 include:

• AT&T
• Axtel Networks
• Bloomberg
• China Unicom Global Limited
• Colt Technology Services
• HGC Global Communications
• Lumen
• Orange
• PCCW Global
• Sparkle
• Telefónica Global Solutions
• Telia
• Zayo
• 1 unannounced

The 16+ companies committed to implementing LSO Sonata APIs include:

• CMC Networks
• Proximus
• TELUS
• TIME dotCom
• Verizon Business Group
• 11 other service providers

Our goal is to gain approval from as many companies as possible to list them as buyers and/or sellers within the LSO Partners Group and the new LSO Marketplace. We have many companies asking for this and more detailed information.

The LSO Partners Group currently is evaluating a proposal to develop a list of buyers and sellers that will include details regarding supported releases, functions, and product payloads, as well as contact information. We encourage all buyers and sellers to provide input on the proposal. We will need corporate approvals before such information can be published.

MEF has introduced a broad range of commercial and technical resources to make it much easier for service providers of all sizes to adopt LSO Sonata APIs. These are designed to support service providers throughout all stages of their adoption journey. Chief among the new programs are MEF’s LSO API Onboarding & Interop Test (OIT) Service and MEF 3.0 LSO Sonata Certification.

LSO Sonata Adoption Lifecycle

See this LSO Sonata resource page on MEF.net for links to a number of these resources.

MEF members can find more information on these resources and the standards-related work of MEF committees in the LSO Sonata Adoption Tracker (available exclusively for members).

MEF’s LSO API Onboarding & Interop Test (OIT) Service offers an efficient, predictable, and scalable solution that service providers can use to test their LSO Sonata implementation and to perform interop testing with partners. It consists of software-based LSO Sonata Buyer & Seller Emulators hosted on a dedicated public cloud server for a subscriber.

Offered through Amartus, a MEF-Authorized Test and Certification Partner, the OIT Service entered general availability in October 2021.

See the MEF Solution Brief – LSO API Onboarding & Interop Test Service for a quick overview.

See the FAQ – MEF LSO API Onboarding & Interop Test Service for details.

• MEF 3.0 LSO Sonata certification is a subset of the new MEF 3.0 LSO API certification program formally launched in September 2021. It builds upon MEF’s years of experience providing service, technology, and professional certifications for Carrier Ethernet and SD-WAN services.MEF 3.0 LSO Sonata certification enables buyers and sellers of wholesale connectivity services to validate that their suite of APIs used for inter-provider business transactions conform to MEF standards. Tested and certified LSO Sonata APIs are a combination of four elements listed below.
  1. Buyer or seller
  2. Business function
  3. LSO Sonata release
  4. Product payload

  Offered through Iometrix, a MEF-Authorized Test and Certification Partner, MEF 3.0 LSO Sonata certification entered general availability in October 2021.

  See the MEF Solution Brief – MEF 3.0 LSO Sonata Certification for a quick overview.

  See the FAQ – MEF 3.0 LSO Sonata Certification for details.

MEF intends to address this question (with estimates) in Phase 2 of our LSO Sonata research. There are 3^rd party LSO Sonata API solutions available to help significantly speed up the development process and provide timely support for new releases. And the new OIT Service shortens development and test time because companies can use emulators to test against multiple partners at the same time.

This depends on which two releases you compare. Starting from the Billie release – where every business function was covered – the number of changes is dropping significantly while stability is rising. Apart from Celine’s new support for Internet Access, the only significant API changes from Billie to Celine are some fixes and the introduction of new functionalities. Currently, the best estimate is 5% to 10% of the full implementation time to move from Billie to Celine. Each LSO Sonata API comes with release notes to help identify the changes and estimate the potential work.

Yes. Once the Business Requirements and Use Cases and Developer Guide + API documents are published standards, the work on specific APIs essentially will stop. Only bug fixing may occur afterward, or possibly an amendment if needed. There is a chance that address validation, site query, POQ, and quote in Celine will reach the Letter Ballot status and likely will not change for Dolly.

Billie, Celine, etc. are marketing names for SDK releases. Each of the APIs has its own semantic numbering.

The following are key contacts:

• LSO SDK Releases: community_manager@mef.net
• LSO Onboarding & Interop Test Service: LSOOIT@mef.net
• MEF 3.0 LSO Sonata Certification: LSOCert@mef.net and Info@Iometrix.com
• LSO Sonata and other API standards in the LSO Committee: lso@mef.net