LOS ANGELES — MEF today announced progress on MEF 3.0, including a new MEF 3.0 SD-WAN certification program, an SD-WAN certified professional program, and research into the continued exploration of a standardized managed SD-WAN service definition.

The industry association, which aims to define standards for network virtualization and life-cycle services orchestration (LSO), has expanded beyond its initial focus on carrier ethernet to include SD-WAN, optical transport, IP, and security services. MEF 3.0 covers each of those network services and is working to expand adoption of its standards among software developers, IT professionals, and network operator engineers.

MEF’s community has grown about 70% to more than 200 organizations during the last 18 months and it expects to double that number by the end of 2020. But membership is not the same as active participation. MEF Chairman Mike Strople prodded the audience here at its annual conference to get more actively involved in MEF’s initiatives.

“Only 25% of our member companies are considered active in our various projects… And for the most part, it’s about 100 individuals who move these projects forward,” he said, adding that MEF currently has about 50 projects under development. Despite being fierce competitors, organizations throughout the ecosystem need to be united around these efforts because it will strengthen their respective core businesses, Strople said.

MEF Founder and President Nan Chen says the association is focused on enabling service providers to synergize overlay and underlay network services, deepening integration between the edge and cloud, and facilitate the delivery of MEF 3.0 services on 5G in 2020.

SD-WAN has become integral to MEF’s vision. During the last year, it published a global SD-WAN standard and launched a project for application security on SD-WAN. “The days of deploying SD-WAN over internet and hoping for the best is gone,” Chen said.

“We really want to enable a fully federated and global network service fabric, which delivers [an] unprecedented enterprise user experience,” he said. This will require a tighter integration between the underlay and overlay network technologies with common models for the network core, services, resources, and interoperability, he explained.

MEF also highlighted the progress its made in developing standardized LSO APIs for service orchestration across multiple providers and technology domains with more than 50 service providers now at various stages of evaluation. To that end, MEF announced the availability of the LSO Sonata SDK Release 4 for inter-provider serviceability.

On the certification front, MEF says 25 companies have achieved MEF 3.0 certification to date and 13 service providers are participating in a pilot of the MEF 3.0 LSO Sonata certification program.

Moreover, the MEF 3.0 SD-WAN services certification program will enable technology providers to validate and conform their services to MEF’s recently published SD-WAN service attributes standard. Seven service providers are part of an initial group selected to participate in a pilot program and the first certified companies will be announced in early 2020, according to the organization.

MEF’s SD-WAN certified professional program is designed to validate the workforce skills, knowledge, and abilities based on the MEF standard. More than 200 individuals from 80 companies participated in a beta test phase recently and successful participants will receive their credentials later this month, according to MEF.

MEF Founder and President Nan Chan kicks off the sixth annual MEF event in Los Angeles.