MEF’s Forward Step in LSO API and NaaS Strategy – Digital CxO Podcast EP116

Hello and welcome to the digital CXO podcast. I'm Amanda Ani and with me today I have Pascals. He is the M-E-F-C-T-O.

How are you doing today? Or meh I should say. Good, Amanda, how are you doing?

I'm doing just fine. Doing well. So before we get started, just for those who may not know, can you talk a little bit about meth and what services that you provide?

Yeah, meth, actually, MEF is a forum, a non nonprofit industry forum. And we formed in 2001 and really basically pioneered the care ethernet market and drove $80 billion. But that was all the way from 2001 to about 2016 and still growing.

And when gangbusters, I came as a CTO of 2016 and we've been really evolving enough to be much more than care Ethernet, obviously it's still important, but being what we call network as a service and basically taking all that care, ethernet and transports and making 'em on demand and then going up into SD WANs become huge. But application assurance and then obviously cybersecurity's, top of mind, everybody. So we've done work on that, on standardization, SS e on cybersecurity and S-S-E-Z-T-N-A.

And then we have a multi-cloud part to all of this NA story. So four teams, underlay on demand, uh, application assurance with SD-WAN cybersecurity, with SS E-S-C-Z-T-N-A and multi-cloud including AI clouds and all kinds of clouds that, you know are emerging. And all that's wrapped with our API automation.

So when we talk about network as a service, basically, you know, the ability to be able to buy anything as a service, turn it up as a service, like a cloud-like experience is critical and automation plays a very critical part of that. So must be providing all of that B blueprint for all of that capabilities. Awesome.

Yeah, and of course all of that underlying technology is so important in, in most digital transformation initiatives as well. Yes, absolutely. Everybody's on that digital transformation journey right now.

Every, every, every company, every service provider, everybody's, it's amazing. Yes. So recently there was Mobile World Congress of which MEF was a part of, and y'all had some pretty big announcements.

Can you start off sharing with, uh, some of the most key announcements from, from that congress Mobile World Congress? Yeah, absolutely. I gotta say it's been really exciting time.

In 2025, we first started with 2025 with a big bang, we released our most impactful SDK basically. And uh, basically that is really, really powerful. 'cause basically our SDK, we have the ability now to have and provide not only the business APIs, you know, for quoting, ordering and so on, but now we have all the operational capabilities that allows all the ecosystem to be able to provide observability across that ecosystem so they can look at performance, fall, trouble ticket, all that kind of important information that every enterprise wants to see when they're connecting themselves as an ecosystem supplier.

So that was a very important release, release that in January. And then after that, mobile World Congress, early March, we went and demonstrated two very fundamental things and and very powerful. Number one, we showed this idea that everybody's talking about network APIs, specifically the ability for applications to interact with the network and to be able to either program it or be able to get information from it.

And specifically 5G. So they call these cera APIs, the Linux Foundation and GSMA. Um, and these network APIs that have really been coming from Cera, Linux Foundation, uh, networking, these network APIs.

And they actually very powerful, but they're very 5G focus. So what we showed was the ability for an application to interact with the network, but not only a 5G network, but a wireless and a wired network. So what we demonstrated was an application was doing a very critical capabilities of basically, uh, a remote technician was at a site doing and talking to a main expert at the main site.

And they really had to rely on that video experience and making sure that the main expert could see everything. And what would be happening was that the quality, the experts on a 5G wireless network, well sorry, the technician was a 5G, uh, wireless network at the site and the expert was sitting back at headquarters and basically the quality would diminish and the application would automatically sense it and basically program into the 5G network and the wired network of the end-to-end to have that quality increased of bandwidth and quality of experience so that the expert at the main site could see what the technician could see. And basically that was all done real at real time.

So really powerful show that at GS a's mean pavilion, which is the Mobile World Congress, you know, just to make puts on that show. And it was very powerful to show the wired and the wireless network working together in an application programming the networks with these network APIs become quality on demand. That was really, really powerful.

Absolutely. I could see how that would be, nothing would get dropped. Yes, exactly.

And, and it really just, normally it would be some kinda user or someone had to call some help desk or someone to provision it. This was the application, realizing it wasn't getting the quality automatically making these API calls to the network, both the wire, the wireless network, and uh, increasing that performance and quality and then all of a sudden the application will work perfectly. So very powerful.

And that's really what the future holds. Definitely. So what else I, I know you had a few other announcements there was, um, continue, you look like you're excited to share the next one.

Sure have. Yeah. Yeah, it, it was really funny because there was so much excitement and so much buzz at the show.

And what we also showed was, you know, with AI top of mind everywhere we showed that the ability for this idea of that a customer could order at the edge A GPU, so we call it GP as a service, the ability that basically a customer could say, you know, at my edge I really want some GPU services. So they could order, for example, tensors the right clock, speed the memory, everything from the edge and basically try to load their models on. So we actually showed through our API that you could do with all that.

And it was really powerful that basically the enterprise could order the GP they wanted, it would go to that site location that the order they want an order from, they would provide on that requirements of tens, cores, memories, plot speeds and so on. A quote would come out and say, yes, we can do it. And then they basically on that, then basically they would go, okay, I wanna order it.

And then they would order it and then basically flow through, enable that, whether it be at a partner network or in their network, enable those GPUs based on the location and then the customer will go, great, now it's up and running. And then additionally we showed with a AI model of this computer vision model of a partner, we showed the idea that basically the model would then load onto that GPU and actually run and take traffic management cameras from around the world and show traffic patterns of these traffic management, how they could optimize the lights and so on better. So very powerful, you know, use case of the emergence of AI and how inference at the edge and latency becomes very important.

Now every enterprise wants but AI models, branches and sites and edges to do very specific use cases. So very exciting to show that very advanced use case. Yeah, absolutely.

I appreciate that you're able to share those use case ideas. Yeah, it was, it was, it was so fun to be involved in these, you know, emerging themes. And so, so we're very, very excited.

Now, additionally, we just announced that, you know, with our cybersecurity, you know, SSE certification, we launched last year at our g and e global NASA event in October. We've gone to ga, general availability now we've have, you know, tremendous providers and top vendors all certified for cybersecurity and how will they protect, you know, and, and manage threats. Now we've added, you know, the co one of the fathers of SI of sass E Joe Carpa who retired from Gartner and he's one of the fathers with Neil McDonald and he actually has joined our technology advisory board where we meet four times year with our board of directors and so on.

And, uh, he's joined in with that tremendous expertise he brings and he's gonna be part of these discussions how we continue to evolve our SSE certification. And so that's, that's really, really, really exciting. Absolutely.

That's big. Congratulations on that. Yeah, and, and and to be honest with you, additionally we will be, um, having this, this webinar that we'll be having on April 22nd at 10:00 AM eastern time and we will, I will be part of this and we'll be talking about how you can gain a competitive edge but me certified SASS and SD wan and uh, that's gonna be a very, very exciting, uh, webinar.

So I hope, um, many people can join that in spring. Yeah, Absolutely. Um, and would they just go to the site to register for that?

net and I think you can look for events there and so on. And find the webinar and join it for free. And it's very exciting 'cause we're gonna talk a lot about what we're doing with SSE certification and why it's so important to build that confidence in society and to remove these threats that are emerging from all over.

And how we actually test and measure those threats. Like for example, we test for over a million plus malwares or samples of that as least exploits, evasions. All of these critical threats are coming through the landscapes, you know, of our, of our enterprises and our even our homes and so on.

So all our vendors, all the top vendors out there for cybersecurity are being testing and certifying against our certification. And it's a very powerful certification and I hope many people join the webinar to learn about this. Absolutely.

So it seems like MEF is involved in many different things. From your experience, uh, what are some of the key issues or concerns from business leaders, um, in any of these areas that you just mentioned? And are there any trends you're seeing this year?

Amanda? It's so funny, there's so much going on. It's, it's, it's fun.

It's so much fun to be honest. You there is, you know, I just came back from the NVIDIA conference and there's so much going on there too. I think what we're seeing is, and this I think is a real powerful idea, that our source provider members that we have 200 plus members, mainly 135 plus service providers worldwide.

They're all have be building transports all over the world, business level transports and even the internet transports. But these business level transports have to be mission critical now and they're now running AI workloads on them and you know, they're relying on the networks to handle these AI workloads. And without these business networks being very high quality and mission critical in nature, these AI workloads won't run correctly.

6 terabytes per second across the data centers to keep all these models up to date and synchronized, you know, these larger foundational models, that's a big wave happening right now. And our API support this ability to buy and sell these wavelengths to connect them. Additionally, we see these idea that inference at the edge, we talked about the GPUs as a service and models and so on, but also the quality of the network as I talked about, to program the network for certain quality.

These AI agent AI agents are coming in and they want to be able to say, I just talked to all these models near to the edge, far from the edge regional. And as they get all this information, they, they basically break down a high level of intent into a very autonomous task and they get, you know, the ability to reason on their own instead of programming it. And these agents are smart and these agents have to get all this information and they can't be blocked from an information 'cause of the network.

And so the ability to program the networks have on a quality of this and a delayed jitter bandwidth is gonna be very important because, you know, models are not large language models anymore. They're large multimodal models, which means they support voice, you know, video, images, text, you know, all of these things. And uh, and, and so this becomes very, very important that, uh, the networks are very high quality.

So we're very exciting times to be honest. See that our MAP network as a service has to handle all of these underlays, these overlays for application assurances like ai, cybersecurity, protect the networks of business network be protected, you know, so there's no malware and threats coming through, especially for AI agents. And then finally, you know, all of this is in a cloud-like experience and connecting all kind of clouds.

So really a lot going on. I know everything has to be automated, so believe me, I'm up very late all the time. Yeah, we're in the middle of a huge technological revolution.

It's so interesting to see what's coming next ever. It seems like something big every month almost. Yes.

And I can imagine you're covering so much of this, so you must be having so much fun too. It really is fun. Well, if there was one key takeaway you could leave our audience with today, what would that be?

That, you know, the world is moving very fast. The MAP network as a service blueprint enables many providers and enterprises. We seven enterprise Rupa of joined map, they all want to deliver a very fast agile cloud-like network.

And to do that, we provide the blueprint for that with all the automation, APIs, the certifications, the standards, the assets. And this allows everybody to get onto this network as a service journey. And, and that's very important 'cause really networks have to be very agile and fast and be on demand now.

They can't be three months and six months provision stuff. And unlike the internet, which is just, you know, where your packets in and hope they come out, business networks can operate that way. They have to be very deterministic.

And to do that, we have to do all of this automation, all of this really complex stuff. So it's, it's, it's a daunting task, but lots of fun. Yeah.

There's so much data back and forth and messaging and everything is so fast-paced. Yes, exactly. Alright, well thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all this news and your insights with our audience today.

Oh, absolutely. A pleasure, Amanda, and always a pleasure to talk to you. You too.

And stay tuned. There's more.