MEF and the TM Forum have completed the first step to ensure that both will be able to automate collaborative offerings using open APIs. The MEF TM Forum collaboration is designed to aid service providers to expand from their own limited ecosystems/islands to offering on-demand digital services across multiple providers.
Among the MEF TM Forum collaborations:
- TM Forum is developing Domain Context Specialization Guidelines to enable MEF LSO Sonata APIs to conform to TM Forum Open API standards.
- MEF is using TM Forum API tooling to build the set of LSO Sonata APIs.
MEF’s inter-provider LSO Sonata APIs enable users to:
- Automate business-to-business transactions between service providers for address validation, site queries, product offering qualification, product inventory, quoting, ordering, trouble ticketing, etc. LSO Sonata APIs now aligned with TM Forum APIs enable a broader range of providers to interconnect together in a federated model for on-demand ordering and rapid delivery of services.
- Automate MEF 3.0 Carrier Ethernet services, with additional work underway to automate connectivity services such as IP broadband, IP MPLS, dedicated internet Access and 5G.
- Automate and standardize purchases of services across multiple service providers.
“API alignment between MEF and TM Forum paves the way for members of both standards bodies to federate with . . . confidence and will accelerate service delivery across multiple providers.” said Pascal Menezes, CTO, MEF, in a prepared statement. “Automation of inter-provider services – with currently available and planned LSO APIs – ultimately opens up opportunities to offer enterprise customers on-demand/ dynamic connectivity with coveted global reach.”