Comcast Business, Spectrum Enterprise, Telia Co., and PCCW Global this week became the first service providers to receive the MEF 3.0 SD-WAN services certification. Developed by MEF and first announced in November, the certification aims to help enterprises select an SD-WAN vendor or service provider.

MEF President Nan Chen expects to see the MEF 3.0 certification gain widespread adoption moving forward. "We expect broad adoption of certified MEF 3.0 SD-WAN services and technologies will help fuel market growth and enable the creation of powerful new hybrid networking solutions optimized by digital transformation," he said in a statement.

Certified vendors and service providers have been tested against the requirements defined in the MEF 70 SD-WAN Service Attributes and Services standard. As with the first round of vendor certifications in January, testing was conducted by Spirent Communications.

The certification seeks to make vendors and service provider's SD-WAN offerings more comparable, eliminate confusion, and accelerate adoption, according to MEF CTO Pascal Menezes in an earlier interview with SDxCentral.

"It describes the behavioral model, not the implementation," he said. "We never describe implementations because every vendor wants to take the behavior and do their own implementation of it."

By standardizing SD-WAN, “it allows the subscriber to buy a service from a managed SD-WAN operator and to understand what they are going to get,” Menezes said.

This first round of vendor and service provider certifications come after more than two years of development beginning in 2017. MEF launched the 3.0 multi-vendor SD-WAN implementation project in 2018, which culminated in the release of a draft in May and its subsequent release last year.

This week's announcement comes just over three months after MEF announced Nuage, Versa, and Infovista were the first vendors to receive its MEF 3.0 SD-WAN certification.

MEF said the certification program will be transitioning from a pilot to general availability later this year. What the certification will ultimately cost vendors and service providers, however, remains unclear.

“MEF is wrapping up our pilot MEF 3.0 SD-WAN certification program and moving to general availability within the next few months. We are in the process of determining post-pilot pricing and our certification test partner Spirent should be able to share that with companies who wish to pursue certification,” said Stan Hubbard, director of communications and research at MEF, in an email to SDxCentral.