What is SD-WAN? It's a question that can easily garner more than a dozen answers depending on who you ask, but MEF wants to change that. Today MEF unveiled the first standardized definition for SD-WAN.

Ratified at the MEF's annual member's meeting earlier this year, the SD-WAN standard (MEF-70) describes "requirements for an application-aware, over-the-top WAN connectivity service that uses policies to determine how application flows are directed over multiple underlay networks irrespective of the underlay technologies or service providers who deliver then."

According to MEF Chief Technology Officer Pascal Menezes, the standard is based on behavior rather than technology specifications or protocol. Essentially, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck then its probably a duck — or in this case an SD-WAN.

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

The announcement of the standard comes after nearly two years of development beginning somewhere around 2017. Last year MEF launched the 3.0 multi-vendor SD-WAN implementation project, which culminated in the release of a draft in May and its subsequent unveiling this summer.

MEF claims that standardizing SD-WAN will have numerous benefits including helping to accelerate the SD-WAN market and improving customer service. However, one of the core benefits identified by MEF will be establishing a common language for defining SD-WAN technologies.

"If you ask 10 different people 'what is SD-WAN?' you'll get 11 different answers," said Jack Pugaczewski, principal architect at Centurylink. "What MEF has done here is — specifically with MEF 70 — is draw to a common definition for services."

Menezes said this is largely because every SD-WAN vendor speaks a slightly different language.

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," he said, adding that as more vendors begin to speak the same language the faster the standard will be adopted.

The new standard has already garnered widespread support from numerous industry leaders in the SD-WAN space including Nokia-Nuage, Fujitsu Network Communications, Amdocs, Ceragon, Cisco, Colt, Futurewei, Silver Peak, TDS Telecom, and Verizon to name a just a handful.

Pugaczewski said MEF's efforts have opened the door to greater automation

"I can now take the common service definition, and I can work with products, people, architects, developers, software engineers, and start building open standard APIs that support what customers and providers need — not just providers to customers but also provider to provider," he said. "This becomes the first step to enable us to move as an industry to automation, which is giving customers such things as turning up a service in 30 to 90 seconds rather than their existing experience which is 30 to 90 days. You need to move toward automation."

"Verizon is pleased to support MEF's industry-leading SD-WAN standardization work. SD-WAN is the way to interface policy with an intelligent defined network, and standardization makes it easier for integration to work across multiple types of underlying transport services," said Shawn Hakl, senior VP of business products at Verizon, in a prepared statement.

And according to Mike Sapien, an analyst at Ovum Enterprise Services cited in MEF's announcement, the standard comes at a pivotal moment as consumer adoption of SD-WAN continues to rise and service providers struggle to meet demand. "Hybrid networking, including Sd-WAN services, can only grow in adoption and deployment, and having the same definitions and standard for comparison should make it easier for the providers and customers to understand various service attributes and confirm feature alignment," he said.

MEF is already working on the next release of the SD-WAN standard, which will define service attributes for application flow performance and importance, SD-WAN topology, and connectivity and underlay connective service parameters.

Menezes said MEF anticipates delivering many of these upgrades sometime next year.

MEF is also looking into standards related to SD-WAN, including security, intent-based networking, and information and data modeling.

And according to Menezes many of these developments will be discussed in greater detail at the MEF19 networking event in November.

MEF also plans to launch its MEF 3.0 SD-WAN certification pilot in the fourth quarter of 2019.