Leading innovators to demonstrate agile, assured, and orchestrated Third Network services powered by LSO, SDN, NFV, and CE 2.0

Los Angeles, April 18, 2017 – MEF, the driving force enabling agile, assured, and orchestrated Third Network services, today announced that the Call for Proposals for the fourth annual Proof of Concept (PoC) Showcase is now open. The PoC Showcase is the centerpiece of the MEF17 event that will be held November 13-16, 2017 at the Loews Sapphire Falls Resort in Orlando, Florida. With a target audience of 1,000+ attendees from 275+ companies and 35+ countries, MEF17 is the world’s premier networking conference focused on advancing Third Network connectivity and cloud services for the digital economy and the hyper-connected world.

“Each year the PoC Showcase demonstrations become more sophisticated and help accelerate industry efforts to create a worldwide ecosystem of automated, virtualized, and interconnected networks supporting orchestrated on-demand services,” said Nan Chen, President, MEF. “This year’s demonstrations promise to illustrate groundbreaking advances in inter- and intra-provider open LSO (Lifecycle Service Orchestration) APIs that enable service orchestration across multiple provider networks and multiple technology domains within provider networks.”

“We expect PoC participants will showcase leading-edge LSO solutions such as fulfillment, assurance, and analytics of wavelength, Carrier Ethernet, Layer 3 IP, and SD-WAN overlay services using combinations of open and closed source software, open specifications, commercial hardware, SDN, and NFV,” said Pascal Menezes, CTO, MEF. “This year’s edition will display many of the latest projects and work areas of MEF and highlight progress in aligning the ecosystem of standards and open source players to drive the industry forward.”

The Call for Proposals is now available on the MEF17 Proof of Concept Showcase page. The submission process closes on June 30, and selected participants will be announced in early September. Participation will be limited to a maximum of 18 demonstrations, so MEF encourages a team approach with service providers and network and service orchestration technology providers coming together to spotlight benefits of industry collaboration.

All PoC Showcase participants are eligible to compete for the MEF Proof of Concept Award that recognizes the demonstration that best showcases dynamic Third Network services delivered over automated, virtualized, and interconnected networks. A panel of judges will review the participants’ demonstrations and score them on innovation, demonstration quality, and alignment with MEF’s work and vision.