The development of the council is part of MEF’s drive to develop standards for SD-WAN services, alongside a wider push to drive adoption of MEF 3.0 services for cloud delivery of enterprise software-as-a-service applications.
The initial council, which was revealed as part of MEF18 in LA this week, includes members from enterprises such as Bloomberg, DHL, Intuit, Microsoft, PWC, the Royal Bank of Canada, Refinitiv, and Ubisoft.
MEF hopes the EAC will help its members explore LSO principles and open APIs for on-premises enterprise adoption, whilst also influencing vendor and service provider communities in their relationships and offerings for the enterprise market.
MEF president Nan Chen said: “Our rapidly evolving market is being shaped by disruptive technologies like SD-WAN, SDN, NFV, and LSO, making it essential to strengthen the channels of communication among enterprises, service providers, and technology vendors in order to provide information and feedback on business requirements and use cases.
“The MEF EAC brings representatives of the very important enterprise stakeholder group into direct engagement with MEF’s community of 200+ member service providers and technology-related companies. The council will collaborate with MEF and extend our reach to incorporate this critical element of the ecosystem and establish MEF as the enterprise’s trusted advisor in digital transformation.”
Gert Vanderstraeten, a network architect with Microsoft’s IT Network Infrastructure Services division, is one of the inaugural members of the EAC. He said: “Digital transformation is happening at every layer of the network, impacting how services are created, delivered, monetized, and consumed.
“MEF is creating the framework for how automated networks will interoperate, bringing together the brightest minds from the enterprise, service provider, and vendor communities.”
