MEF and TM Forum established a joint initiative to align their respective API, product, and service models. This new collaborative effort will streamline automation for MEF Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) implementations delivered across a global partner ecosystem.
MEF NaaS services include on-demand connectivity like Carrier Ethernet and IP, application assurance via SD-WAN and E2E network slicing, cybersecurity capabilities such as SASE, SSE, and ZTNA, and multi-cloud for multi-access edge computing (MEC) and cloud connectivity.
“Our expanded collaboration with TM Forum to align on common APIs and data models empowers service providers to automate the full lifecycle delivery of complex multi-provider NaaS services with the ease, agility and responsiveness businesses expect in the cloud era,” said Pascal Menezes, CTO of MEF.
Breaking proprietary silos
One of the issues that’s often made the service ordering process challenging for carriers and enterprises is the long timelines it takes to procure a service due to proprietary elements.
The digital infrastructure sector is currently overwhelmed by proprietary and non-standard API implementations that need to scale with enterprises' evolving automation requirements and the complex ecosystem of telecom service providers, hyper-scalers, data centers, and technology suppliers.
Standardized APIs reduce market confusion, cut both capex and opex costs and accelerate time to revenue.
By aligning MEF’s extensive Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) APIs, which provide automation between parties in an ecosystem, with TM Forum’s proven Open Digital Architecture (ODA) and Open API standards, which provide automation within each ecosystem partner’s systems, the collaboration aims to deliver an integrated automation solution to advance digital services for the enterprise through industry-wide standardization.
Open API focus
A big focus of the MEF and TM Forum collaboration is driving open APIs.
MEF’s LSO APIs have extensive interoperability capabilities to facilitate the automation of business and operational functions between ecosystem partners, including retail and wholesale service providers. These capabilities clarify attributes within the APIs and product and service models for various NaaS services. Over 160 service providers are currently in multiple phases of MEF API adoption.
TM Forum’s portfolio of 80+ Open APIs is a widely adopted industry standard, with over 870,000 downloads by over 48,000 registered developers and 1,100 conformance certifications in commercial software products and real-world implementations.
As part of the collaboration, MEF will evolve its LSO APIs to conform to TM Forum’s Gen5 Open API standards, using Domain Context Specialization (DCS) capabilities to support standardized, MEF-defined models. MEF will design product and service models conforming to TM Forum Gen5 API DCS design patterns and governance and work towards compliance with the conformance test kit (CTK).
TM Forum will its comprehensive suite of widely adopted automation assets, including Open Digital Architecture, Gen5 Domain Context Specialization APIs, and its NaaS TMF909 API suite to provide an abstraction layer mapping NaaS services to network resources, irrespective of vendor implementation.
Initial work on the first APIs has established a clear technical path to delivering a full API suite for automation within MEF’s NaaS domain by the end of 2025.
Also, the two organizations will collaborate to develop service models for MEF-defined NaaS services aligned to TM Forum’s automation assets, addressing the core requirements of MEF-standardized and other NaaS offerings.
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