DENVER — “MEF continues to help the industry move toward digital transformation,” Dan Pitt, SVP of MEF, told SDxCentral in conversation at this week’s Big 5G Event. And this means continually evolving its approach by allowing operators to experiment through the abstraction of lifecycle service orchestration (LSO).

Last April the forum expanded its 3.0 framework with specifications to deliver new services and to be able to orchestrate its framework over multiple network technology domains. However, looking forward MEF aims to publish standards for its SD-WAN framework and LSO Sonata API in the second quarter of this year.

MEF has been working on an SD-WAN standardization since at least 2017, and last October created a technical specification to define specific SD-WAN services and their attributes. The reason for the upcoming framework is to “try to get the industry to agree on the terminology,” said Pitt, and to determine what is needed in order to achieve multi-vendor SD-WAN environments.

This framework, he says, will benefit customers and operators alike. Operators will be able to offer more choice with the assurance that the technology is standardized across the suppliers, and customers will have more choice and flexibility based on the operator’s ability to offer more, according to MEF. This work began in May 2018 as MEF worked with SD-WAN vendors on a multi-vendor implementation SD-WAN project so that service providers could leverage the 3.0 framework in deployment.

Key attributes that technologies will have to meet include providing a virtual overlay network that enables application-aware, policy-driven, and orchestrated connectivity. There is a “big future” in overlay for operators and it will be targeted toward a managed services approach to SD-WAN for service providers, says Pitt.

The company has also expanded with the release of a security-as-a-service project in January, which is part of MEF 3.0. This project is primarily suited for the protection of applications in SD-WAN environments.

And, in order to speed up its process of delivering its APIs, MEF has started offering the APIs as software development kits (SDKs) before being formalized, so community members can play with that and provide feedback to the specification.

As with many other groups and organizations out there, MEF is preparing for 5G.

“5G is starting to appear,” said Pitt, adding that “it’s a lot of things to different people.” Where MEF is interested, however, is that “it’s turning into a catalyst for the adoption of SDN, NFV, and cloud — and it’s hard to envision 5G achieving its promise without SDN and NFV.”

MEF intends to update its specifications to encompass some of the changes, particularly with network traffic, that 5G will bring. And while 5G services aren’t on the scene yet, MEF is trying to “make it easy to start with 5G,” so that companies can ultimately get revenue from the endpoints, he says.

As 5G begins to pop up, in “islands”, as Pitt refers to them, around the world, those islands will need mechanisms to connect to the rest of the world so that the services are stretching across and reaching end points. And that is where MEF will come in.

The forum is already working on 5G transport constructs and service enablement capabilities for fixed and mobile environments. Following that effort, MEF aims to enable network-agnostic MEF services over the 5G endpoints.

With SDN and NFV poised to play an important role in 5G, Pitt noted that SDN has become much more pervasive as its capabilities broaden. The industry’s push toward software and cloud are starting to enable NFV and SDN to begin generating revenue, he added.

“It is successful as a technology, but not as a marketing term,” said Pitt, noting that SDN takes on a multitude of names. The important point is that “you can do [SDN],” he said.

Ultimately, the promise of SDN is flexible infrastructure, and that will enable a lot of future use cases, Pitt explained. This could include the edge cloud, fog computing, and multi-edge computing (MEC), all of which will be critical for carriers to enable because service providers, more so than cloud providers, have valuable real estate at the edge.