Travis Ewert of Level 3 explains how customer usage of on-demand services has evolved since the company first began offering dynamic capabilities several years ago. What started as a single pain of glass – or one-stop shop user interface – for the customer has evolved to become more of a customer defined network with the introduction of programmability. Programmability, for example, allows a customer to schedule service changes or tie changes to analytics: “They can actually pick a segment of their network and say when utilisation does this, do this for me.”

These new capabilities have been well-received by customers and changed the dynamic of the customer relationship. The ultimate goal is to provide a feedback loop into SDN, orchestration, and control to “allow the network to make a change on your behalf based on how you define your experience.” Looking at the industry more broadly, Travis advocates that MEF will need to work not only only on "east-west" APIs for control of orchestrated services across multiple operators, but also the exchange of data analytics and intelligence over consumable APIs.

Filmed at: MEF 16, Baltimore, USA, 8 November 2016