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Over the past 12 months, MEF members have made major strides in driving development of a global federation of network, cloud, and technology providers supporting dynamic, assured, and certified services that power enterprise digital transformation. The combination of standardized overlay SD-WAN and security services and high-performance underlay connectivity services will enable service providers to offer powerful MEF 3.0 hybrid networking solutions with unprecedented user- and application-directed control over network, security, and service capabilities.
Our progress is reflected on numerous fronts:
- 46 companies now provide MEF 3.0 certified services and technologies, nearly triple the number of 16 in July 2019.
- 7,180+ MEF certified professionals are employed by 440 organizations in 85 countries.
- 8+ service providers are production-ready with LSO Sonata APIs for inter-provider automation.
- 50+ active MEF 3.0 projects and other initiatives related to services (SD-WAN, SASE, application security, Carrier Ethernet, IP, and Optical Transport), LSO APIs and automation, 5G, Lean NFV, certification, and more.
- 14 published standards since July 2019 across the breadth of MEF 3.0 work areas.
- 8 published white papers, including the recently released MEF SASE Services Framework.
- Strong double-digit year/year growth in visitors to MEF.net and MEF member websites, including a greater than 50% year/year increase in August 2020.
- 25 sponsors so far for the MEF Infinite Edge Series of virtual events starting in November 2020.
In coming quarters, MEF will be heavily focused on delivering on the vision of federated overlay and underlay services, enabling network edge transformation with 5G and E2E network and enterprise slices, and integrating virtualized network security functions into a SASE cloud managed offering. Our work will help communications service providers transform into digital service providers (DSPs). By offering on-demand and dynamic services across automated networks, DSPs are better able to address the challenges and opportunities associated with digital inversion at the network edge – the trend in which more users, devices, applications, and data are located outside corporate walls than inside the enterprise.
