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MEF recently sat down with new MEF member, Synchronoss, to learn about what led the organization to become a member and how MEF membership will benefit not only the company but their customers.
Joining MEF in the discussion are Synchronoss’s Christian Auzias De Turenne, Senior Director of Product Management, Jason Burwitz, Strategic Sales Director, and Deric Vinyard, Vice President of Global Sales.
MEF: What led you to MEF?
Jason Burwitz, Strategic Sales Director: Ultimately, we were led to MEF by customer requirements for more standardized broadband connectivity that the industry could get behind and use.
We spent time talking to customers and understanding their requirements especially around broadband connectivity. A lot of what we heard was about the complexity of first mile/last mile and overlay services enablement. That complexity requires automation to simplify and scale and that is of great interest to us.
There’s really no standard for broadband globally. We’re excited to leverage MEF standards to bring a simplified and common process for ordering broadband in our platform to our existing and prospective customers.
Deric Vinyard, Vice President of Global Sales: My history in OSS goes back quite a ways. I was involved with a company that was tracking and following the evolution of Ethernet standards to make sure our product set was evolving at a commensurate pace to serve the needs of our customers. I’ve watched MEF evolve over many years and, in particular, over the last year or so when Christian and I began to talk about formalizing a membership with MEF. We had been consumers of LSO Sonata before we joined and as we came to the point of releasing the product for general availability, we wanted to fully leverage MEF membership programs and LSO API support and direction in the future.
One of the things that Christian and I immediately noticed – and were impressed with – is how MEF focuses on member outcomes. We’re paying close attention to how we can leverage MEF’s open standards to drive more interoperability of our platform for the MEF community.
Networking during the MEF Q1 2023 member meeting in LA provided unique perspectives on how we continue to evolve product our set to meet the changing needs of the MEF membership.
MEF: Christian, how easy was it to justify joining MEF?
Christian Auzias De Turenne, Senior Director of Product Management: It was not difficult at all to convince our leadership of the value in joining the MEF community. In the US telecom market we needed a path to evolve from legacy ASOG and LSOG standards to newer industry supported APIs like LSO Sonata.
LSO Sonata is a broadly accepted standard and embracing it opens our platform up to a much broader addressable market globally. Not just from a carrier-to-carrier business perspective, but from an enterprise-to-carrier business perspective leveraged by a common set of LSO APIs. The opening up of markets for us globally through our MEF membership was key to the executive support we have.
Additionally, LSO Sonata is very flexible and rolling it out in our ConnectNX order lifecycle management platform has been very straightforward for our technology teams. The LSO SDKs easily accommodate differences in how service providers interact with each other while maintaining a common workflow structure. The LSO Sonata Order Management flow we use today will expand to newer services such as internet access and SD-WAN and will be consistent with our applications workflow intelligence.
As we bring SD-WAN, internet access, SASE, Zero Trust and network slicing payloads to market, adding those to the customer’s platform will be very easy to enable. LSO Automation APIs are providing Synchronoss with tremendous value right now!
MEF: What are other project areas in MEF you are excited about?
CD: The concept around validating and rating orders within the order lifecycle leveraging Blockchain is exciting to us.
Certification of a forthcoming invoice that is ultimately immutably settled by the distributed Ledger is a powerful new way to think about expense and revenue settlement for legacy and new, on-demand services. It’s really a compelling and exciting use case. We are excited to continue our work with AT&T and Verizon and our partners at Sage to bring pre-order and order validation to life in the blockchain flow.
We want to eliminate the need for any invoice validation process post order so CFO’s can announce full revenue recognition quarterly and not hold back with accruals because of errors, omissions, or disputes.
MG: It’s been interesting to see how your longstanding partnership with Sage is evolving as you collectively interact with other MEF members that are leading industry changes in the US. It is a great example of leveraging you complimentary capabilities to add a sharper dimension to the value proposition you’re bringing to the market.
That 1+1=3 partnering is an incredible example of what MEF membership can produce.
CD: You know it’s a really exciting time to shape the future of order flow management and expense management within MEF.
MEF: If there was one piece of advice to give to a prospective MEF member, what would that be?
DV: If you’re considering joining, do it. Do it sooner rather than later. The ability to expand the total addressable market for our platforms by adopting some of these new and evolving MEF standards made it very compelling for us.
The ability to meet and network with over 200+ members and socialize our capabilities is also hugely compelling.
With less business travel today, the opportunity to meet partners and members at quarterly MEF member meetings and at MEF’s annual event is ideal for us.
And MEF is very focused on helping us create opportunities for positive outcomes for us, our partners and the service providers we both serve.
JB: You really have an opportunity to meet one-on-one with service providers like AT&T and Verizon and have conversations about real problems and real solutions to those problems in a trusted environment. It’s truly one of a kind.
The wide variety of skills, backgrounds, and interests at MEF events fuels the ideas and concepts that move the needle on business and service orchestration.
CD: At MEF we can be a change agent for service providers transforming their network solutions infrastructure. But the key is that we do it collectively, as an industry, which provides opportunities to collaborate in ways that we might not otherwise have done.
Learn More
Learn more about Synchronoss’ NetworkX product suite at www.synchronoss.com.
By becoming a MEF member, you join over 200 leading global organizations, collaborating to address the industry’s business challenges to empower enterprise digital transformation. Explore the opportunity to join MEF.
About the MEF Member Spotlight
The MEF Member Spotlight series offers MEF members the opportunity to share how they are leveraging MEF standards, LSO APIs, and certifications to expedite their innovation cycle, address critical issues for service providers, and offer value-added solutions to their customers.
In each Q&A session, members share their experiences, challenges, and successes, offering insight into best practices that result in a more collaborative and innovative MEF ecosystem.
Interested in participating in a MEF Member Spotlight? Contact us!
