2023 MEF: Global NaaS Event Showcase

Dan Wagner, CEO and Founder of CloudSmartz, highlighted the company's decade-long commitment to developing automation solutions for the trillion-dollar telecom industry, with a recent focus on enhancing customer experience. Despite its small size, CloudSmartz is growing rapidly by offering products that manage service provider-customer relationships, support Network as a Service, and accelerate revenue while reducing costs through automation, thereby competing effectively against larger software companies.

Divesh Gupta, VP of New Technology & Sales Operations at PCCW, discussed the company's development of Network as a Service (NaaS) for over five years, highlighting their product Edgeport that provides automated connections between data centers and enterprise buildings using MEF LSO Sonata APIs. Gupta also shared a use case of their product portfolio under Console Connect, where they orchestrated connectivity from Hong Kong to Singapore, offering an on-demand connection to AWS, resulting in significant cost savings.

Jorge Brites, Senior Manager of Architecture & Innovation at Cirion, outlined the company's new business strategy which includes technology evolution and aligning its operations with the MEF lso framework. Cirion, a Latin American company with 18 data centers and over 5,500 customers, aims to standardize operations, automate processes, and assist other companies in their technological journey.

Michael Kearns, Chief Strategy Officer at Amartus, underscored the significance of automation and standardization in Network as a Service (NaaS) to streamline services for enterprise customers, emphasizing the necessity for standardization processes and API standardization to manage modern networks' complexity. Kearns also spotlighted Amartus' proficiency in network and cloud automation, its recent development of software to enable service trading in a wholesale environment, and its efforts to provide simplified orchestration and automation for enterprise customers, including unified APIs and portals.

Shawn Hakl, VP of 5G Strategy at Microsoft, emphasized the significant strides made by operators and suppliers in adopting the LSO standards and framework, which has enabled automation across various sectors of the industry, particularly in SDWAN and security. Hakl also underscored the importance of forums like MEF in promoting industry collaboration, the advances in generative AI, and the focus on AI-based operations, which are fundamental for automation and the creation of modern connected applications that depend on a differentiated network.

Mauricio Sanchez, Research Director at Dell'Oro Group, lauded MEF's Network as a Service vision for bringing order to numerous standards and providing a clear industry direction, emphasizing the importance of on-demand secure connectivity and the judicious use of APIs. Sanchez concluded that the future will be dominated by APIs, underscoring the need to focus on useful APIs rather than creating them indiscriminately.

Kevin Vachon, COO of MEF, emphasized the organization’s focus on Network as a Service (NaaS) and its role in setting industry standards at the MEF’s Global NaaS event in Arlington, Texas. He also introduced an Enterprise Leadership Council to meet customer requirements and affirmed MEF’s commitment to tracking industry progress and advancing NaaS.

Mirko Voltolini, VP Innovation at Colt, spoke at the MEF Global NaaS event about the potential of Network as a Service (NaaS) to orchestrate services across multiple domains and providers, emphasizing the crucial role of APIs and the need for industry collaboration. Voltolini also shared that Colt has been utilizing APIs since 2015, advocating for the adoption of MEF LSO APIs, and has received positive feedback from customers with a growing ecosystem of partners using automation.

Sunil Khandekar, Chair of MEF's Enterprise Leadership Council, discussed the potential of Network as a Service (NaaS) to simplify network services consumption, despite challenges posed by diverse endpoints and office locations. Khandekar expressed optimism that technology vendors and service providers are progressing towards making NaaS consumption-based, aligning IT infrastructure with business needs in terms of network cloud and security.

Sunil Khandekar, Chair of MEF's Enterprise Leadership Council, is leading an initiative to establish a council comprising senior executives representing all major enterprise verticals to complement MEF's top-tier service providers board and technology vendors technical advisory board, aiming to integrate the essential enterprise viewpoint into MEF's leadership. The initiative also seeks to create a knowledge bank, managed by the Enterprise Leadership Council, to provide enterprises with practical insights for implementing their cloud network and security projects through use cases, best practices, white papers, and tutorials.

Erin Dunne, Director of Research Services at Vertical Systems Group, emphasized the growing significance of network connectivity in facilitating automated services, with layer one and two services like wavelengths and ethernet becoming increasingly crucial. She also highlighted the role of Network as a Service (NaaS) in providing simplicity desired by enterprises, the importance of APIs and standards for service providers and equipment vendors, and the efforts of MEF in enabling cost-efficient and simple automated services among multiple vendors.

Nan Chen, President and CEO of MEF, unveiled the company’s new blueprint for Network as a Service (NaaS) at the MEF Global NaaS event, emphasizing the need for industry standards and MEF’s capacity to standardize and collaborate with the entire industry. Chen also highlighted the role of Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) APIs in delivering automated services and building an ecosystem of service providers, technology vendors, and enterprises, defining NaaS as a blend of on-demand connectivity, application assurance, multi-cloud services, and cybersecurity delivered over a global network.

Pascal Menezes, CTO of MEF, presented the new Nas Global blueprint at the MEF Global NaaS event, aiming to standardize APIs to facilitate interaction between hyperscalers, product vendors, and cloud operators. Menezes envisions a future where all clouds are interconnected, creating a “super cloud” for a seamless user experience, and highlighted the synergy between MEF’s work and APIs from organizations like TM Forum and the Linux Foundation’s CAMARA project.