BROOMFIELD, Colorado – MEF CTO Pascal Menezes sees the industry trade association's efforts in API standardization as akin to the concept of open source software.

"We created this blueprint ... that has the automation aspects of it, real clarity of vocabulary, and service definition of our standards," Menezes said during his keynote at the MEF Annual Members Meeting, drawing comparisons between the forum's work and the nature of open source.

MEF's API standards aim to build a baseline blueprint for companies, in the same way open source does, to advance the quality and quantity of valuable industry products and services, he explained.

And similar to open source, "we do not want to commoditize any of our members or vendors or service providers. We want to make sure that you have the ability to innovate on top of all the great assets you bring — all your features, your support, your ecosystem partners, and so on," Menezes said.

With open source, "you have a lot of developers either sponsored by the corporation that says go work on an open source project, or you get people who [say] on my part-time I will work on that project, because I'm really interested in that," Menezes explained in an interview with SDxCentral.

Service providers and tech vendors similarly sponsor teams to help with the areas of MEF's work that are strategic to them as a standard base platform.

"We're more of the former, where we have our members say, you know, from their self-development staff or their technology staff, hey, this is strategic to us. Go work on this one project or two projects that MEF's working on, because it's important ... that's how analogous this is," he said.

Recruiting Vendors

If MEF's industry efforts are to prove fruitful, its membership needs to expand to include more tech vendors in addition to service providers, Menezes explained. "Because if everyone's gonna [build] from scratch, they're never gonna get there fast enough," he said.

To that point, "I'm really pleased to say that our technical execution has been absolutely superb," Menezes said, citing the forum's high fidelity and high interoperability of APIs across the stack.

A lot of this technical execution is in terms of automation, which "cannot be a nice-to-have anymore," Menezes touted.