News

SD-WAN Service Providers Earn First MEF Certifications

• By David Ramel
• 03/20/2020

MEF, a 200-member strong industry association focused on networking, named four software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) service providers who are the first to earn the organization's new certification.

The providers were certified for MEF 3.0 SD-WAN services, meaning they conform to the global standard developed last year by the association, called SD-WAN Service Attributes and Services (MEF 70) (Note: Clicking on link may initiate PDF download). MEF said it "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 them."

The first four service providers earning the cert are Comcast Business, PCCW Global, Spectrum Enterprise, and Telia Company.

"End users who purchase certified MEF 3.0 SD-WAN services can have confidence that they align to well-developed standards created by MEF -- the world's authority for standardized network services," the association said in announcing the certifications. "Specifically, MEF 3.0 SD-WAN certification involves rigorous tests of the service attributes and requirements defined in MEF 70 and described in detail in MEF’s draft SD-WAN Certification Test Requirements (MEF 90) standard."

MEF earlier this year announced the first certified MEF 3.0 SD-WAN technology vendors.

At the time, 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.

In this week's announcement about service provider certifications, association president Nan Chen said, "MEF congratulates Comcast Business, PCCW Global, Spectrum Enterprise, and Telia Company for achieving MEF 3.0 SD-WAN certification, which is an important innovation milestone not only for each company but also for the industry at large. We expect broad adoption of certified MEF 3.0 SD-WAN services and technologies will help fuel market growth and enable creation of powerful new hybrid networking solutions optimized for digital transformation."