(L-R): Debika Bhattacharya, Chief Product Officer, Verizon Business Group; Andrew Dugan, CTO, Lumen; John Nolan, VP Global Connection Management, AT&T; Stan Hubbard, Principal Analyst, MEF.

BROOMFIELD, Colorado – Industry trade association MEF is pushing the implementation of its Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) Reference Architecture and APIs to help interoperability and agility for its networking-focused member base.

During a service provider executive panel at this week’s MEF Annual Members Meeting, John Nolan, VP for global connection management at AT&T, explained that this is a big issue in the U.S. where operators are bogged down with legacy systems that rely on different interoperability models.

“Outside the U.S. where we didn't rely on decades old, standard ways of placing orders, the LSO API's were a big step forward in terms of how we check for service availability, get the latest pricing, ultimately, place orders, get order status, be able to open trouble tickets into trouble ticketing status. Here in the U.S. we've got legacy systems that we have to contend with,” Nolan said. “Everybody with those legacy systems has a roadmap to modernize. So, it's really a question of where we can insert this vision into that roadmap and making sure that people understand the benefits around not having to pick up the phone or sending an email to get status reports.”

MEF LSO efforts are based on its Sonata reference architecture and APIs. These standardize multiple sets of service automation protocols across network providers and the technologies used in those networks.

MEF also has its Cantata APIs that more specifically target the business interaction layer between service providers and customers. This includes services like billing, quoting, ordering, and inventory tracking. MEF launched its LSO API Marketplace earlier this year to further accelerate the ability for members and other organizations to access the APIs.

Lumen CTO Andrew Dugan said that MEF and its members were making progress toward greater domestic adoption of these standardized APIs, with a big focus on how to help those members work through their own specific modernization journeys. Dugan suggested that one model could be to create a “heat map” that can track adoption.

“People can see who, not necessarily by name who's implementing but how much activity was on the buy side, how much is on the sell side and which of the API's they are working on,” Dugan said of that plan. “I think that will help people focus on where they might get the most benefit for starting the implementation.”

Verizon Business Chief Product Officer Debika Bhattacharya added that MEF members are beginning to realize timing is becoming a factor and that automation is key to accelerating adoption.

“Creating API's is not new for service providers, we’ve been doing that for a long time,” she explained. “But what's new is the standard. Previously, there was proprietary API's or pair-wise API's, but what this allows us to do is to create it once, use the standard API's, and reuse them across the board.”

Bhattacharya added that this can also help create the necessary business case around investing in the creation and adoption of these APIs.

“We can create API's, but then if you still have a lot of legacy processes and systems in place, you've created a highly modernized API, but then you're still using older constructs and older processes,” Bhattacharya said. “This is an opportunity for us to look at ourselves and modernize some of our commercial constructs and our product definitions so that you're not taking an older process and just automating parts of it, but you're actually using this opportunity to re-imagine and design for the future.”

(L-R): Debika Bhattacharya, Chief Product Officer, Verizon Business Group; Andrew Dugan, CTO, Lumen; John Nolan, VP Global Connection Management, AT&T; Stan Hubbard, Principal Analyst, MEF.