MEF enhances effort to attract enterprise, smaller carrier members to the NaaS ecosystem

DALLAS—MEF, a key force in driving standardization around best practices and services for Ethernet, is enhancing its membership strategy with a subscription-based membership framework, aiming to attract enterprise businesses and smaller service providers.

Launched during this week’s Global NaaS event, MEF said the updated structure reflects its MEF’s commitment to fostering growth in the evolving Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) landscape by increasing industry-wide participation and aligning more closely with the needs of a diverse ecosystem.

These new membership subscriptions provide members broad access to MEF’s essential Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) resources, including SDKs, developer community support, and industry-leading test and certification services. These tools enable organizations to accelerate product development, achieve greater interoperability, and strengthen their market position in the rapidly growing NaaS ecosystem.

Kevin Vachon, MEF's COO, said that its work to attract enterprises and others enhances its reach as a service enabler.

“Since last year, we’ve been repositioning ourselves as a collaborative platform,” he said. “The MEF delivers many elements like standards and APIs, but if you’re going to be the North Star in this collaboration vehicle for this community, you need to ensure that membership structure is open and welcoming.”

He added that the MEF has seen new companies emerge in the services space, a “reflection of where we need to go.”

Attracting enterprise leaders

One of the critical segments that MEF is keen on bringing into the fold is enterprise businesses.

A key element of MEF’s efforts to collaborate with enterprises is the creation of its Enterprise Leadership Council (ELC), which comprises senior executives (CxOs) from mid-to-large enterprises.

The ELC will help MEF deliver what it says is “meaningful value for enterprises” by providing actionable ideas and knowledge to help execute cloud, network infrastructure, and security projects.

MEF’s new membership structure offers options for the wide array of organizations shaping the NaaS ecosystem, from end-user enterprises and communications service providers (CSPs) to hyperscalers, SaaS providers, and network and security solutions providers.

Through participating in MEF, these organizations can engage with global system integrators, data centers, and test and certification specialists and drive the development of new NaaS services.

Sunil Khandekar, MEF's Chief Enterprise Development Officer, said that while its membership had plenty of vendor and service provider members, it lacked enterprise involvement.

What began with four founding members now includes 14 executives from various sectors, including technology, healthcare, and finance.

“We took a conscious decision to look at what we have at MEF: we had excellent representation of service providers and technology vendors, but we were missing enterprises,” Khandekar said. “Our enterprise members come from various verticals and geographies, which is important.”

By taking input from the ELC, MEF was able to create a draft standard for enterprise services. “For the first time in the industry, we’ll have an automated process to signal to the enterprises if their circuit for their service is impaired, being put in service, or is down.”

Another critical area that the ELC will tackle is cybersecurity. The service provider can more readily tell their enterprise customer if their organization faces a security breach.

“It’s all about how a service provider signals the enterprises if there’s a threat in their network that could potentially impact an enterprise,” Khandekar said.

Enabling smaller providers

Attracting enterprises is only one part of MEF’s membership drive effort.

Since service providers of all sizes work together to provide services for enterprises, MEF is keen to attract smaller providers. While network automation will initially appeal to and be adopted by large providers, it will eventually be something other providers could use.

Smaller providers that have to provision a circuit for a larger carrier to fulfill an off-net business will be more effective in helping their carrier customers if they have automated NaaS tools.

“Automation over time will move from being more of a focus for Tier 1 and Tier 2 operators going down market to smaller operators as the ecosystem expands,” Vachon said. “What we have done with our membership structure is to make it attractive for smaller providers and the data center community to come in and get access to all of the MEF APIs and support tools.”

MEF’s sentiment about working with smaller providers was also heard on other panels, such as the LSO On-Ramps for Non-Automated Service Providers.

Michael Kearns, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer for Amartus, said having a typical workflow with all suppliers, including smaller providers, is essential to enable order consistency.

“To have a consistent interaction with all your suppliers is very important regardless of whether you can get an immediate response from the supplier,” he said. “You’re improving that situation dramatically if you have the same consistent level of information, so you should try to assist those smaller suppliers to do it.”

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