News

First Certified MEF 3.0 SD-WAN Technology Vendors Announced

• By David Ramel
• 01/08/2020

Industry association MEF announced the first three software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) technology vendors certified to meet a new standard for supporting MEF 3.0 SD-WAN services.

First to earn the certification are: Nuage Networks from Nokia, Versa Networks, and Infovista.

The association introduced the MEF 3.0 transformational global services framework that's used to define, deliver and certify assured services orchestrated across a global ecosystem of automated networks.

"This certification enables service and technology providers to validate the conformance of their services and products to the industry-leading SD-WAN Service Attributes and Services (MEF 70) global standard," MEF said in a Jan. 7 statement. The standard was finalized in August 2019.

The association said MEF 3.0 SD-WAN certification tests the service attributes and requirements defined in MEF 70, which will be described in detail in an upcoming MEF SD-WAN Certification Test Requirements (MEF 90) standard. Organizations acquiring MEF 3.0 certified solutions can now be more confident that they have met the highest levels of performance established by MEF, the asociation said.

MEF said key benefits of the SD-WAN standardization effort that's expected to help accelerate SD-WAN market growth while improving overall customer experience with hybrid networking solutions include:

• Enabling a wide range of ecosystem stakeholders to use the same terminology when buying, selling, assessing, deploying, and delivering SD-WAN services.
• Making it easier to interface policy with intelligent underlay connectivity services to provide a better end-to-end application experience with guaranteed service resiliency.
• Facilitating inclusion of SD-WAN services in standardized Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) architectures, thereby advancing efforts to orchestrate MEF 3.0 SD-WAN services across automated networks.
• Paving the way for creation and implementation of certified MEF 3.0 SD-WAN services, which will give users confidence that a service meets a fundamental set of requirements.

"SD-WAN is gaining incredible excitement and momentum for empowering digital transformation," said Nan Chen, association president. "We congratulate Nuage Networks, Versa Networks, and Infovista for achieving MEF 3.0 certification and demonstrating that they are a standards-based partner for service providers developing SD-WAN services. We look forward to continued momentum with the MEF 3.0 SD-WAN certification program, including the announcement of our first group of certified service providers later this quarter."