The MEF has appointed its first ever chief technology officer and expanded the scope of its work to accelerate the transition to agile, assured, and orchestrated Third Network services.
The MEF now has more than 30 ongoing projects and initiatives, including a new project on Layer 3 IP service attributes that is a key step toward enabling multi-operator orchestration of IP services using MEF LSO (Lifecycle Service Orchestration).
MEF appoints Pascal Menezes as CTO
Pascal Menezes, former principal at Microsoft Skype for Business, was appointed as CTO to lead the MEF’s technical strategy and align key work programs internally and in conjunction with the open source and SDO partners. Pascal will engage with the MEF’s global membership base to ensure that the organisation’s strategy and work plans are market-driven, with agility and time to market being prime objectives.
“I am delighted to announce Pascal Menezes as the MEF’s CTO,” said Nan Chen, president of the MEF. “With nearly 30 years of industry experience, Pascal brings a wealth of knowledge about cloud scale architectures, real-time media networks, LSO, SDN & NFV technologies, standards, and open source initiatives that will be of great benefit to the MEF community.”
“The MEF has reshaped the industry with Carrier Ethernet and is poised again to play a major transformative role with the Third Network using LSO, SDN, and NFV,” said Pascal Menezes. “I am excited to be a part of the MEF team as we become a more software-aware organisation, and I look forward to working closely with MEF members, the open source community, and other industry stakeholders to realise the Third Network vision.”
New Layer 3 IP services work
Although IP services are widely deployed, there currently is no standard definition of attributes used to describe them like there is with Carrier Ethernet today. This makes it difficult for IP service providers to interconnect with each other and represents a major obstacle to automating and orchestrating IP service ordering and management between providers.
The MEF’s Layer 3 IP project aims to address these challenges by creating a standard set of service attributes that can be used to define IP services delivered over a single provider network or over multiple interconnected networks. Having standardised service attributes – consistent and compatible with the globally adopted CE 2.0 services framework – will allow Layer 3 providers to leverage LSO definitions work and the new LSO Reference Architecture to create agile, assured, and orchestrated IP services.
“The new MEF project on IP Service Attributes is the first step in incorporating IP Services into the MEF LSO framework,” said David Ward, CTO and chief architect, Service Provider Division, Cisco. “It enables the definition of standard LSO APIs and Yang modules at the service layer for managing and monitoring IP Services – including inter-provider services – that are consistent with the LSO Reference Architecture used for Carrier Ethernet services. Enabling automation of inter-provider IP services is a key pain point for our Service Provider customers today, which this work will help address.”
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