Less than two years after MEF debuted its MEF 3.0 SD-WAN certification, the industry trade group is once again looking at ways to squash lingering pain points.

The new effort, called Universal SD-WAN, is an attempt to define a minimum level of interoperability for the data plane, management plane, and telemetry plane between SD-WAN technology vendors.

“Customers are indictating what they want for an SD-WAN,” MEF CTO Pascal Menezes said. "They invest in a certain vendor and they want that managed SD-WAN provider to support that.”

The challenge is service providers now have to support a wide range of SD-WAN vendors, each with different management paradigms, he explained. Universal SD-WAN attempts to solve this by standardizing low-level functionality while leaving higher-level functionality — what Menezes calls the vendor's secret sauce — untouched.

While the project is well underway, Menezes said some vendors remain hesitant to embrace this level of standardization. This hesitance comes in stark contrast to the strong support among service providers, which will benefit from greater consistency and reduced operational overheads, he added.

The program, which is currently in draft form awaiting formal ratification sometime in early-to-mid-2022, comes as MEF's earlier SD-WAN certification sees widespread adoption.

Introduced in late 2019, the MEF 3.0 SD-WAN certification and its accompany MEF-70 SD-WAN standard described requirements for application-aware WAN platforms that use policies to determine how application flows are routed over multiple underlay networks.

The goal of MEF-70 was to reduce the burden on the communications and managed service providers that deliver these services by standardizing the terminology used to describe products and functions, Menezes said. “A lot of the time people label things differently and then they don’t know what you’re getting.”

Vendors and service providers that met these requirements were eligible for certification under the program.

Today, more than two dozen SD-WAN managed service providers and vendors have been certified, including four of the top five SD-WAN managed service providers — AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and Windstream Communications — listed in Vertical Systems Group’s most recent leaderboard. Additionally, several of the top SD-WAN vendors including Versa, Fortinet, VMware, and Cisco also garnered certification.