Educational, interactive, and forward-looking MEF16 Workshops will explore the latest industry initiatives to enable agile, assured, and orchestrated Third Network services for the digital economy and the hyper-connected world. MEF now has more than 40 initiatives to enable creation of Third Network services that offer user-directed control over service capabilities and cloud connectivity. MEF’s COO will provide an overview of the organization’s strategic work in 4 major areas: (1) Third Network services (wavelength, CE 2.0, IP, and Layer 4-7 cloud services), (2) LSO Reference Architecture, (3) Open Initiatives, and (4) certification programs for services, equipment, and professionals. Join us in moving the industry forward!

MEF is uniting industry efforts to enable orchestrated connectivity services (wavelengths, CE 2.0, and IP) and orchestrated Layer 4-7 cloud services (e.g., NFV-based security) across multiple provider networks. Service providers want to offer these services over more automated, virtualized, and interconnected networks that are more closely married to the cloud. But to expand their service reach and deliver more dynamic services, they need a standards-based approach that facilitates seamless service interoperability with other providers and enables end-to-end service automation with open APIs. This session spotlights MEF’s new service-related work beyond CE 2.0. We will provide an update on MEF’s Layer 3 IP project that will create a standard set of attributes that can be used to define IP services delivered over multiple provider networks. Standardized IP service attributes consistent with those of globally adopted CE 2.0 services will allow service providers to leverage MEF’s LSO work to create orchestrated IP VPN, IP transit, and Internet access services.  We also will cover recently launched initiatives for Layer 1 wavelength services, security-as-a-service, and other service-related topics.

MEF has defined an LSO Reference Architecture with APIs to automate the entire service lifecycle for coordinated management and control across all network domains responsible for delivering end-to-end services over multiple operator networks. This increasingly important area of work enables service providers to transition away from today’s silo-structured BSS/OSS approach towards flexible end-to-end service orchestration that leverages the benefits of SDN and NFV. This workshop will provide a progress update on LSO-related developments, share how they have been well-received in the market by service & technology experts, and highlight opportunities for professionals to play roles in advancing LSO work. We will cover such topics as: the LSO Reference Architecture & Framework (MEF 55), interfaces, APIs, operational processes/threads, and information models, as well as LSO’s relationship with SDN & NFV.

MEF is playing a major role in aligning the ecosystem of industry standards and open source players to accelerate the transition to Third Network services. This workshop provides an update on exciting open initiatives and other collaboration activities guided by MEF’s Office of the CTO within the context of a more agile standards development lifecycle. These include: OpenLSO (Open Lifecycle Service Orchestration) and OpenCS (Open Connectivity Services) reference implementations and use cases, the LSO Hackathon, MEFnet, and the UNITE program. Speakers will highlight how industry professionals can become involved in leading and shaping important projects that leverage both open source & closed source solutions. Speakers will discuss MEF collaboration with the Linux Foundation's OPEN-Orchestrator (OPEN-O) Project and other open source projects.

Highly successful in helping create the $80+ billion market for CE services and technologies, MEF’s certification programs for services, equipment, and professionals are now evolving to accelerate the industry transition to Third Network services powered by LSO, SDN, NFV & CE 2.0. This workshop will explain the business benefits of each certification program and present road maps for the inter-related development of the programs. Among the topics covered will be the transition of the services certification program from static CE 2.0 to orchestrated Third Network services (CE 2.0 + IP + more) and the expansion of the equipment certification program to include VNF-based CE 2.0 products and platforms that support the provisioning of CE 2.0 services via LSO Presto Network Resources Provisioning (NRP) APIs. Speakers also will discuss the evolution of the popular MEF Carrier Ethernet Certified Professionals (MEF-CECP) program.

MEF is focused on accelerating worldwide deployment & interconnection of CE 2.0 networks to fuel market growth and create a firm foundation for Third Network services. Expanding upon extensive specifications, operational frameworks, and certification programs, MEF has advanced important initiatives like the Ethernet Interconnection Points (EIP) Project (see MEF 54) and the MEF Services Interconnect (MEF-SI) Program that streamline deployment of fully-featured interconnections between different service providers. A growing community of operators using efficient and scalable standardized Ethernet interconnections promises to boost market growth by cutting provisioning times, eliminating the need for operators to certify each other, and easing delivery of CE 2.0 services to more off-network locations. In addition, MEF has introduced new full-featured wholesale CE 2.0 services – including Transit E-Line and Access E-Line described in the MEF 51 – that offer key enhancements to the CE 2.0 Access EPL and Access EVPL services defined in MEF 33. The new Transit E-Line and Access E-Line services are among the first MEF services poised to be certified to work with LSO Presto NRP APIs, and therefore have particularly important roles to play in creating a more automated Third Network-ready infrastructure. MEF51 also is serving as a basis for a new MEF project defining Managed Access E-Line Services. This workshop will bring attendees up-to-speed on the latest MEF wholesale- & interconnection-related initiatives and identify opportunities to progress industry efforts to build out the high-performance connectivity fabric that will underpin Third Network services orchestrated across multiple providers.

Two years ago, MEF launched its vision to enable Third Network services optimized for the digital economy and the hyper-connected world. Warmly received by many top service and technology leaders across the globe, the Third Network concept combines the agility and ubiquity of the Internet with the performance and security assurances of CE 2.0. Third Network services provide an on-demand/agile, assured, and orchestrated experience with user-directed control over service capabilities & cloud connectivity. These services are delivered over automated, virtualized, and interconnected networks powered by LSO, SDN, NFV, and CE 2.0. This keynote will provide a progress report on major initiatives – including collaboration with numerous open source projects and industry standards organizations – that are turning the Third Network vision into reality.

The Digital Economy is now. We are surrounded by new technologies, gadgets, services, and content that is customized to each one of us and delivered to the device of our choice. Yet, the Digital Economy is not about “machinery." It is about people - all of us around the world. Machines, Robotics, Internet of Everything, Mobility, and Connectivity find their ultimate purpose in improving people’s life through automation of everyday activities, enhancing decision making, and ultimately creating time, value, and relationships in the global world. The DNA of the Digital Economy is connectivity. The network is the ultimate scarce resource connecting people, machines, and organizations. We need to think differently about connectivity services and embrace Software to gain speed, agility, and reliability. Service Lifecycle Management goes well beyond the network and extends to Experience Ecosystems centered on people. Let’s embrace transformation and let innovation become our guiding principle.

The shift from connectivity to hyper-connectivity is one of the biggest trends impacting our world today – accelerating social, economic, political, and technological change at a phenomenal rate. We have witnessed extraordinary macro-changes and the stunning growth in data & video in the past 10 years that have been enabled by a mix of old and new network technologies and the cobbling together of static connectivity and on-demand cloud services. As remarkable as the changes have been thus far, we have barely seen anything yet. We are well on our way toward automated, virtualized, and interconnected networks that are more closely married to the cloud. Join our panel of senior service provider experts to explore game-changing on-demand service capabilities that will disrupt the provider landscape and take hyper-connectivity and associated productivity to the next level.

Service providers are starting to invest in open platforms based on SDN/NFV technologies and reshaping how they offer hybrid WAN services. This includes variations on some old technology with some new emerging technology, including SD-WAN. The WAN and mix of network services are just the beginning. These new platforms will also serve to connect to data centers, central locations, and distributed branch locations. They already are expanding to other managed services beyond standard network services. What has driven this development? What are customers demanding? What is the road map for these services? On this panel, we will hear a perspective from one of the world's largest enterprises on evolving network services requirements, including the need for end-to-end visibility. And multiple service providers will share their recent announcements and near term plans on the panel. What problems need to be solved for customers? For service providers? What have been the major challenges? Where do we go next?

A growing number of service providers are adopting SDN & NFV solutions to provide new virtual network services that support enterprise digital transformation, but they need LSO capabilities and APIs to overcome OSS/BSS obstacles to realize the full benefits of software-driven and virtualized networks. Numerous service providers are rolling out or planning to rollout NFV-enabled services – such as virtual security, virtual routing, and virtual WAN optimization services – that can be ordered, changed, and monitored on-demand via a customer web service portal. What key challenges do they face as they scale deployments, and how can these challenges be overcome? This panel brings together top technology experts to explore examples of how LSO, SDN & NFV can be effectively combined to efficiently orchestrate and assure virtual network services in large-scale environments.

Service providers need to evolve toward agile, assured, and orchestrated Third Network services to effectively help their customers compete in today's fast-moving, hyper-connected world. Many end-users are going through digital transformation and seeking more affordable, tailored solutions that allow them to be more productive. Retail and wholesale customers are looking for cloud-centric, on-demand services from service providers & network operators just like they look for on-demand solutions elsewhere in their daily lives.  On-demand services are not just a nice-to-have luxury, but over time will become increasingly expected and key to maintaining business agility, controlling cost, and gaining a competitive edge. Join leading service & technology experts in this Track to explore the pace of change in the market and gain fresh new insight into competitive threats and opportunities (including SD WAN, dynamic WAN+ cloud, etc.) that will help you navigate through this exciting industry transition.

This Track brings together leading experts to comprehensively examine emerging service orchestration solutions that will help operators manage and control Third Network services over more automated and virtualized networks. Our discussions take place within the context of MEF's published LSO Reference Architecture (MEF 55) and ongoing standards development work related to LSO interfaces, APIs, operational processes, and information models required for automating the entire lifecycle of services orchestrated across multiple network domains and multiple operator networks. LSO work is being done with strong support from service and technology providers and in collaboration with other industry standards organizations and open source projects.

MEF research and other data indicate that dozens of service providers worldwide have begun to deploy or plan to deploy on-demand Third Network / CE services and expect to add increasingly sophisticated service capabilities over the next several years. At the same time, it is clear that many service providers face a variety of strategic, operational, technical, and workforce challenges to be able to deliver, support, bill for, and market new Third Network services. Chief among these challenges for many operators is the fact that their current OSS/BSS infrastructures lack the ability to support the provisioning of dynamic services, are outdated and inefficient, and need to be overhauled. Many service providers are embracing LSO and supporting development of APIs to automate as much of the service lifecycle as possible in order to overcome operational and business challenges that impede their ability to offer Third Network services. Top service provider experts on this panel will explain why they favor LSO development and share their perspectives on the benefits that a standardized approach to service orchestration will bring to the industry.

Service providers face a myriad of technical and operational challenges in orchestrating services that will only increase in complexity with the addition of virtual network domains and multi-provider scenarios. Operators are looking for orchestration software solutions that integrate the 8 key capabilities of LSO – service fulfillment, control, performance, assurance, usage, analytics, security, and policy based on open and interoperable standards – to help them address these challenges. During a mix of presentations & Q&A discussion in this session, top experts will explore the complexity of the situation and walk through practical steps that service providers can take to overcome orchestration hurdles. Speakers will share perspectives on automating various aspects of the end-to-end service lifecycle, and will discuss LSO solutions within the context of the broader orchestration ecosystem.

Enterprises and businesses of all sizes are looking for more flexible, efficient, and reliable cloud connectivity options as they embrace hybrid private and public cloud solutions. Experts on this panel will explore the growing number of available CE-based options that allow users to access cloud applications with the guaranteed performance SLAs, visibility, control, security, and choice that they cannot get with best-effort Internet access to the cloud. Learn about new solutions that go beyond dedicated private connections to a single cloud provider and give users the ability to easily and quickly access multiple cloud providers within large cloud ecosystems. Discover how the evolution of orchestrated network infrastructure is turning networking into a solution that becomes more accessible, efficient, and agile, mirroring the attributes of the cloud services it enables.

Exploding use of cloud-based applications, increased mobility, and the emergence of software-based, hybrid WAN technologies are prompting many enterprises to re-evaluate their networking strategies. For example, SD-WAN enables enterprises to explore new hybrid WAN deployment approaches that make the best of Internet, MPLS, and Carrier Ethernet connectivity options. SD-WAN utilizes intelligent, application-aware software to route traffic over the optimal network technology based on business policies. The ability to ensure optimal application performance irrespective of the underlying transport – and to control branch-site routing polices remotely – has attracted significant interest from enterprises, especially from verticals with highly distributed branch locations (for example, retail, healthcare, banking and financial services, education). The growing interest from enterprises has influenced leading network service providers to add new hybrid WAN (including SD-WAN) capabilities to their existing WAN portfolios. This panel will bring together service providers and SD-WAN vendors to address key questions: (1) Why are enterprises attracted to SD-WAN? (2) What are the benefits to customers? (3) Who are the early adopters? (4) What are typical early use cases for implementing SD-WAN technologies? and (5) What is the potential longer term impact of SD-WAN on the hybrid WAN services market?

SDN has provided customers with more dynamic control over and visibility into their networks than ever before. In the years since its introduction, we have seen customers evolve from using it manually with the portal, to more automated, event-driven and programmed methods. What enabling capabilities will customers be able to tap into next as Service Providers leverage their real-time Data/Analytics coupled with customer-programmable access? In this presentation, Travis Ewert, SVP, Network Software Development of Level 3, will review the evolution of the customer advantages of SDN, how their model of usage has matured over time, and what this will mean to customers as Service Providers are able to further arm customers with a user experience that they are able to "custom define."

Several of the world's largest service providers will provide a unique forum for understanding their challenges and vision in transforming their BSS/OSS architectures to take advantage of the standardization of granular service orchestration and open APIs to accelerate interconnectivity, interchangeability, and the creation of agile, assured and orchestrated services.

The first ever UNITE Partner Summit brings together MEF's collaborative partners to talk about major shifts in the networking landscape which require industry stakeholders to not only rapidly create specifications and code, but to also ensure that they avoid inadvertently forming new technological and operational silos that leave the market fragmented and unable to scale to meet the challenges of tomorrow. The Summit highlights immediate examples of this new trend of close SDO and Open Source collaboration and enables the participants to address the challenges that are resulting from this innovative approach to building industry alignment.

MEF has adopted a more agile development model that involves realizing specifications in code more quickly, testing things out in reference implementations involving open and closed source solutions, and providing a feedback loop for further specification development.  MEF has created OpenLSO (Open Lifecycle Service Orchestration) and OpenCS (Open Connectivity Services) reference implementations and is working with prominent open source projects and member companies  to maximize alignment of market implementations with MEF published and emerging LSO and connectivity services specs. And LSO Hackathons bring together software developers and network experts for hands-on development of OpenLSO and OpenCS implementations.

This panel brings together key industry SDOs and Open Source projects to address major challenges in balancing the need to innovate and provide solutions quickly in their respective fields of expertise with the need to maximize interconnectivity and interchangeability of those solutions for service providers in the long term in a very complex and rapidly changing ecosystem. How can open APIs be developed that ensure commonality of underlying information models straddling different domains of expertise? How should companies deal with the use of different but rapidly evolving tools in different organizations? How to deal with releases from different Open Source projects and SDOs at different times? These are just some of the challenges being faced today which the panel experts will discuss.

Information models are the key to streamlined interconnectivity and interchangeability but are often taken for granted, especially since they are new concepts for many that have traditionally focused on transport technologies and protocols. However, information models have come to the fore over the past few years in networking SDOs, with their importance increasingly understood and efforts to develop them emphasized. Because de facto information models are easily created in Open Source projects, and SDOs require a significant amount of time and effort to agree information models, divergence between SDOs and Open Source projects is currently almost inherent in the evolution of the industry. Significant efforts have been made in 2016 to reverse this trend of divergence, and this session will describe a ground-breaking approach on this topic jointly agreed to by MEF, ONF, and TM Forum.

As part of MEF's Open Initiatives, the OpenCS (Open Connectivity Services) projects are implementing open APIs at the LSO Presto interface to enable LSO-based service orchestration for multiple technology domains. Panelists will discuss examples of how OpenCS is being used to develop requirements and generate APIs - including for OpenCS Packet WAN, OpenCS Cloud Exchange, and OpenCS Optical Transport implementations - and how this relies on collaboration with open source projects and SDOs.

Similarly to the OpenCS projects, the OpenLSO (Open Lifecycle Service Orchestration) projects are focused on implementing open APIs to accelerate inter-domain (East-West) automation of all parts of the service lifecycle as well as open APIs for service level and network level orchestration within a control domain. This session will provide a view of the L2/L3 inter-carrier service fulfillment work of the OpenLSO Fulfillment project with regards to the open APIs at the LSO Interlude interface and a presentation on the emerging OpenLSO Assurance project, and how it will enable consistent service assurance across multiple technology domains using open APIs at LSO Interlude and LSO Presto.

We review a specific use case of an agile and orchestrated service that we are all very familiar with - Unified Communications (UC) - and see how collaboration between SDOs and the Open Source community is enabling the addition of assurance to create UC as a Service (UCaaS) to achieve the equivalent of the high quality global telephony solutions of today.

This session presents the proposition that PNDA is the open source infrastructure for big data analytics in the same way that OpenStack is the open source infrastructure for virtualization. It also explores PNDA’s potential impact on LSO.

Inter-SDO and Open Source collaboration as discussed in the MEF16 UNITE Summit brings closer the availability of agile, assured, and orchestrated services that deliver the capabilities that will enable and support the growth of businesses and the economy in the decades to come. We will sum up the most important challenges in collaboration, potential solutions, and the impact those solutions can have in 2017 and beyond.