MEF casts wider net in cloud app market with IMTC
Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), a nonprofit international industry consortium, is seeking to make a splash in booming cloud-centric applications market by integrating the International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium (IMTC) into its new Applications Committee, which formally started work in October. MEF CTO Pascal Menezes currently heads the committee with co-chairs to be determined in the coming months.
As part of the agreement, IMTC will move all of its assets to MEF as active work is carried on within MEF. IMTC member companies that are not current members of MEF will become MEF principal members, the organization said in an announcement.
“As more and more enterprises move their applications to the cloud, there is a need to ensure that cloud applications deliver a high-quality, frictionless end-user experience,” said Nan Chen, president, MEF. “We consider this expansion of our scope of work a natural extension of our MEF 3.0 transformational service framework enabling agile, assured, and orchestrated services across a global ecosystem of automated networks.”
The purpose of the Applications Committee is to enable cloud applications to interact with MEF’s Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) framework through a set of machine-to-machine APIs. LSO is a way of streamlining and automating the service lifecycle for managing network domains that provide end-to-end connectivity service. Released earlier this month, MEF 3.0 services offer an on-demand, cloud-centric experience with user and application-directed control over network resources and service capabilities.
IMTC is currently in the process of being integrated into the Applications Community, incorporating active work of IMTC, such as the internet of things (IoT) and Real-Time Media Software-Defined Networking (RTM SDN) working groups. Application sub-groups will provide various automation use cases, expanding upon those already published by IMTC.
To support a higher level of abstract interaction between applications and networks, an Intent Work Area initially will start under the Applications Committee. The committee will develop an interoperable, intent-based set of LSO APIs, which enable end-to-end orchestration of MEF 3.0 services across multiple providers and network domains.
“With our new Applications Committee, we’re tackling some of the most complex and fundamental issues facing our industry today,” said Anatoli Levine, president, IMTC and director of products and standards for Softil. “This is an exciting time for MEF as we expand the range and reach of our work to encompass the application layer of the network, bring in new members, and help shape the structure of next-generation networks.”
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