“MEF congratulates Comcast Business, PCCW Global, Spectrum Enterprise, and Telia Company for achieving MEF 3.0 SD-WAN certification, which is an important innovation milestone not only for each company but also for the industry at large,” said Nan Chen, president of MEF.
“We expect broad adoption of certified MEF 3.0 SD-WAN services and technologies will help fuel market growth and enable creation of powerful new hybrid networking solutions optimised for digital transformation.”
MEF’s SD-WAN authorised certified test partner Spirent, certified the SD-WAN managed services to validate their compliance to the SD-WAN Service Attributes and Services (MEF 70) global standard.
“Becoming one of the first service providers to achieve MEF 3.0 SD-WAN certification underscores our commitment to being a technology and standards leader to improve the quality, management and interoperability of Ethernet and IP services for our customers,” said Bob Victor, SVP of product management, Comcast Business.
Customers who purchase certified MEF 3.0 SD-WAN services can be confident that they align to well-developed standards created by MEF. Specifically, MEF 3.0 SD-WAN certification involves rigorous tests of the service attributes and requirements defined in MEF 70 and described in detail in MEF’s draft SD-WAN Certification Test Requirements (MEF 90) standard.
“We are proud to be among the first few service providers in the world to be certified for MEF 3.0 SD-WAN services and applaud MEF for their efforts in setting up the first industry-wide SD-WAN standard (MEF 70), said Frederick Chui, chief commercial officer, PCCW Global.
“Our enterprise and wholesale customers embarking on their digital transformation journey can therefore expect better interoperability and improved application performance across disparate service providers’ domains.”
“We are proud that Spectrum Enterprise is one of the first MEF-certified SD-WAN service providers because it demonstrates our commitment to industry standards and innovation,” said Satya Parimi, group vice president of data products, Spectrum Enterprise.
Speaking during a media briefing earlier this week Stan Hubbard. MEF Director of Communications & Research, explained:
“This is announcement is building upon our standardisation effort that began a few years ago, we published the MEF 70 SD-WAN standard last year, and this standard is the first in the industry to define a SD-WAN service and its various attributes.”
Also present during the briefing was Youcef Ayad, senior product manager SD-WAN, Telia Company who explained the importance of this certification based on growing demand from the market.
“Today as the market is growing, there is a need to clearly define and educate our customers and the market what is an SD-WAN service and what are the components an SD-WAN service should include.”
“Telia is proud to be one of the first service providers to have successfully achieved the MEF 3.0 SD-WAN certification milestone, added Tomi Airola, Head of Business Networking, Telia Company.
“We view our MEF 3.0 certification as a key step in addressing the requirements of our enterprise customers. Certification is especially important for helping customers simplify the process of selecting a service provider that is committed to standardized global services
According to Daniel Bar-Lev, VP Strategic Programs and Business Development EMEA at MEF,
“this certification reduces fragmentation in the market, it streamlines the engagement between enterprises and service providers that are offering these services but there needs to be a baseline around which there’s a proof-point for service providers to show that their conformant with the MEF standard.”
Additionally, alongside the previously announced MEF 3.0 SD-WAN technology vendor certification, this MEF 3.0 SD-WAN service provider certification and the soon to be announced MEF 3.0 SD-WAN professional certification, MEF is also beginning work on securing SD-WAN services.
“We believe service providers are not only going to support their enterprise customers by offering them managed Sd-WAN services, but they’re also going to offer them high value Sd-WAN security services,” said Bar-Lev.
“This is because as SD-WAN proliferates, the vulnerabilities will proliferate with them. We’re working with our service provider membership and specialist technology vendors like Fortinet, to define what is an Sd-WAN security service and where going to be highlighting that this year.”
