This PoC brings together service providers and a technology provider within the framework of the MEF Commercial and Business Committee to accelerate the onboarding and interop validation of partner operators that have implemented LSO Sonata business-automation interfaces. The PoC has two primary objectives:
Service Providers can use MEF documentation and a MEF-facilitated service to prepare their tens or hundreds of wholesale partners thereby substantially reducing their mutual workload when onboarding those partners into their MEF-standardized business interface environment.
Adoption of MEF standardized business interface APIs between service providers is increasing the burden on international wholesale operators when onboarding potential new partners that claim to be LSO Sonata-conformant. This PoC demonstrates how service providers can significantly scale up their onboarding process to support much larger numbers of such partners, resulting in far more rapid availability of agile, high-margin data services across multiple footprints.
The need for streamlining LSO Sonata-conformant partners was raised by leading service providers in the MEF membership in early 2020, leading to two MEF white papers on the topic, and then to the formation of an Incubation Group in the newly formed Commercial and Business Committee in the last part of 2021. The increasing number of announcements by service providers confirming their implementation of MEF APIs has only heightened interest in the work of this PoC.
The PoC will document the setup and the results of the practical implementation of partner onboarding and interop validation between MEF-member service providers with an increasingly wide set of business functionalities, combined with product payloads in the form of LSO Sonata APIs. This documentation will initially be made available to MEF members and after that, will be put into the public domain. This PoC is also being treated as a pilot for a long-term MEF-facilitated service for MEF-member companies.
Additional service providers joining the MEF 3.0 PoC (137) will increase the number of use cases and broaden the types of factors being addressed by the implementation of the related Reference Implementation document upon which the PoC is based. Through new implementations of this PoC, the resulting document will achieve the required robustness to make it applicable to a large part of the industry.
A lack of scalability of the process of onboarding LSO Sonata-conformant partners among the larger service providers will slow down the standardized implementation of commercial and business inter-provider automation, holding back the industry’s ability to roll out new, agile, high-value services for enabling digital transformation of enterprises worldwide. This will impact a wide range of critically important use cases, such as secure remote working using SASE and IoT over 5G with AI/ML.
Open to additional MEF members. For details, please contact the PoC team.
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