During the 15th Telecom Review Leaders’ Summit held at the InterContinental Dubai Festival City, Telecom Review welcomed Kevin Vachon, chief operating officer, MEF, in person. In an exclusive interview, Vachon elaborated on how the MEF 3.0 Global Services Framework is being adopted and executed upon by industry partners and customers globally as well as the organization’s plans to innovate and solve industry challenges and develop new opportunities in 2022 and beyond.
How is the MEF 3.0 Global Services Framework being adopted and executed upon by industry partners and customers globally?
MEF has 200+ member companies, approximately 130 of which are service providers. These service providers use our framework to build out services that they offer to enterprises, such as Carrier Ethernet, SD-WAN, and security, while increasingly looking at edge-oriented services as well as wholesale services that support the globalization of these networks.
They use the MEF framework for these services to build up their offerings. And they use what we call the Lifecycle Service Orchestration or LSO, a standardized automation framework and APIs. That's a really hot area for the service providers as they use MEF’s APIs between themselves to automate business functions and transactions. This automation extends to enterprises as well.
There's a growing community of service providers that are using MEF APIs, and we're going to see these trends continue. Lastly, we have over 75 companies that have MEF 3.0 certifications. Having said that, we provide professional training and certifications, and also important, we offer certifications for the technology vendors and the service provider community.
MEF has been at the forefront of empowering enterprise digital transformation. How did you cope with the changes inflicted by the pandemic on this journey?
I don't think the pandemic changed much for us. As an organization, we were virtual and global, and we've always worked that way. And yet, the need for digital transformation and network transformation obviously accelerated during the pandemic, and it's just underlying the need for the communities to come together and collaborate to accelerate that growth.
The role that MEF is playing really became more important during the pandemic. That's one of the positive aspects that we’ve seen from it.
In 2022 and beyond, how do you plan to innovate, solve industry challenges and develop new opportunities?
If you look at the trends, in order for service providers to deliver complex services to enterprises, there's an increasingly large ecosystem of technology vendors, service providers, and cloud providers. We need to do more than just deliver standards for particular solutions, and this is our direction and goal. We are becoming part of the solution to help bring all of these pieces together, automating all of the components in what would be a supply chain.
Taking this into consideration, there's going to be more end-to-end ecosystem automation in 2022 and beyond.
