MEF to Debut New Certification Program at Conference

MEF will unveil a new certification program at this month's MEF17 conference in Orlando, Fla., designed to help its members better understand and implement SDN and NFV.

During last week's Telco Transformation radio show, MEF CTO Pascal Menezes gave a brief overview of the new MEF 3.0 certification program. (See MEF: The Telco Transformation Journey.)

"A lot of our members are saying, 'You know, I have this operational staff, they don't really understand SDN and NFV. They need to get trained. How do they get trained?' So we want to be able to deliver on this broader certification, which we call the Third Network Foundation certification," Menezes said. "It's more like broad strokes to teach and help people get trained on SDN, NFV, lifecycle service orchestration and so on."

MEF 3.0 was designed to implement MEF's Third Network vision and strategy that was announced several years ago. Menezes said the Third Network vision included telcos becoming "more cloud like or cloud-native" to help drive their digital transformations.

On top of the broader, horizontal professional certification, Menezes said that there would be "vertical" certification programs that could include SD-WAN, analytics or deeper expertise on SDN, NFV, MANO and other virtualization components.

"You have this ability of professionals having this wide certification and then building these deep, vertical certifications," Menezes said. "They can really go out and help this transformational journey by knowing the details of how to do this across the technology levels, the APIs and the standards efforts."

MEF 3.0 is comprised of four parts: Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) APIs, new network-based services, certification and community.

Menezes compared MEF 3.0 to MEF's Carrier Ethernet 2.0 (CE 2.0) program that was launched in 2012 as a framework through which service providers and vendors could demonstrate their compliance with MEF Carrier Ethernet service specifications. CE 2.0 defined a suite of Carrier Ethernet services that telcos could deploy and created company certification programs. Today, CE 2.0 is a global $80 billion market.

"It's a really big launch for us," Menezes said of MEF 3.0. "It's as big as CE 2.0, or bigger, in my opinion."

MEF17 will also include details on how it is collaborating with ONAP, ONAP demonstrations, MEF's work on managed SD-WAN services, and hackathons. (See MEF & ONAP Strike Up Collaboration Effort and MEF Takes On SD-WAN Standardization.) MEF17 takes place Nov. 13-16.

— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation