MEF16 UNITE Partner Summit Assembling Open Source and Standards Leaders to Advance OrchestratedServices with Open APIs

LOS ANGELES, 17 October 2016 – MEF (www.MEF.net), the driving force enabling agile, assured, and orchestrated Third Network services, today announced the UNITE Partner Summit will be hosted within the MEF16 (www.MEF16.com) global networking conference taking place 7–10 November 2016 at the Hilton Baltimore Inner Harbor Hotel, Baltimore/Washington, USA.  This gathering brings together key industry stakeholders who are collaborating to accelerate development of standardized solutions that will enable on-demand connectivity and NFV-based services that are orchestrated across multiple network technology domains and multiple interconnected service and cloud providers.

The UNITE Partner Summit, on 10 November, will assemble leaders of prominent standards organizations (SDOs), open source projects, and MEF member companies to maximize collaboration opportunities, including alignment of market implementations of open and closed source solutions with MEF’s published and emerging LSO and connectivity services specifications.  Top experts from the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), OpenDaylight, ON.Lab, OPEN-O, OPNFV, TM Forum, ETSI-NFV, Broadband Forum, ECI, Ericsson, Cisco, and other companies will be participating.

“Worldwide industry momentum is building in favor of agile, assured, and orchestrated services delivered over automated, virtualized, and interconnected networks,” said Pascal Menezes, CTO, MEF. “We must have standardized open APIs within a generally agreed-upon orchestration framework to make this happen. This applies both between service providers to enable ‘East-West’ automation of interconnectivity, as well as within service provider domains ‘North-South’ to maximize agile use of different technology domains. Timely creation of API standards requires a more agile development model in which we realize specifications in code quickly, test things out in reference implementations and provide a feedback loop for further specification development.”

“Realizing the ambitious vision of on-demand orchestrated services across many technology domains and multiple service providers requires SDOs, open source projects, service providers, and technology companies to embrace new ways of working together that leverage the power of software within an open networking environment,” commented Nan Chen, President, MEF.  “We are excited to bring this leadership community together to accelerate innovation.”

Key Summit topics include the following:

• Connecting Open Source & Standards –  A New Agile Development Model
• The Orchestration Landscape: Open Source Projects & Specifications
• TM Forum, ONF & MEF Information Model Collaboration – Accelerating Development Of Open APIs & Orchestrated Services
• MEF OpenCS Reference Implementations – Orchestrating Technology Domains With Open APIs
• MEF OpenLSO Reference Implementations – Orchestrating Services Between Providers And Across Technology Domains With Open APIs

The Summit provides a unique opportunity for professional networking in a collaborative setting and is a means for MEF16 attendees to gain a comprehensive industry view of major SDO and open source initiatives that will shape the future of the communications landscape.