THE HAGUE, Netherlands – MEF and the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) are officially working together, the organizations announced today at the SDN and NFV World Congress. MEF has joined ONAP as an associate member. And the Linux Foundation, which hosts ONAP, has joined MEF as an auditing member.

They say their relationship brings open source and standards together to further their shared vision for service orchestration across multiple providers.

Together, MEF and ONAP count more than 250 combined member companies. The organizations will jointly work on MEF’s lifecycle services orchestration (LSO) framework and the creation of standardized open APIs to automate service orchestration across multiple provider networks.

Why is this necessary?

Arpit Joshipura, general manager of networking and orchestration with the Linux Foundation, told SDxCentral this will help enterprises that offer services across more than one service provider’s network.

“This is standardizing the way two operators will communicate orchestration,” said Joshipura. For example, an enterprise customer such as a large bank might have a headquarters in New York that is served by Verizon. That same bank might also have a London office served by Vodafone. “From the bank’s perspective, this [LSO] is extremely helpful,” said Joshipura. “It gives them a consistent standardized view, and service policy is carried over.”

ONAP claims that its service provider members account for 55 percent of all telecommunications subscribers in the world. “We’ve hit the tipping point in terms of scale,” said Joshipura. In addition, there are 1,150 developers working on ONAP. And the open source project now has 30 sub-projects. ONAP is planning its first release — dubbed Amsterdam — before the end of 2017.

For its part, MEF just yesterday released the LSO Sonata software development kit (SDK) that features standardized open APIs for orchestrating connectivity services across multiple service providers worldwide. And it also released the LSO Presto SDK that relates to service orchestration over multiple network technology domains. The inter- and intra-provider LSO APIs included in these new SDKs are now available for experimental use by MEF members and associated MEF programs.