MEF is looking to make its mark in the growing cloud-centric applications segment by integrating the International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium (IMTC) into its new Applications Committee, an effort that the organization began in October.
Pascal Menezes, MEF’s CTO, currently is leading the committee, with co-chairs to be selected in the coming months.
Under the terms of the agreement, all assets of IMTC will be transferred to MEF and active work will be carried on within MEF. IMTC member companies that are not already members of MEF will become MEF principal members.
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IMTC established itself as a nonprofit organization focused on promoting the development and use of interoperable, real-time, multimedia telecommunication products and services based on open international standards.
Nan Chen, President, MEF, said in a release that incorporating application work into its organization is well timed with the release of its MEF 3.0 initiative.
“We consider this expansion of our scope of work a natural extension of our MEF 3.0 transformational service framework enabling agile, assured, and orchestrated services across a global ecosystem of automated networks,” Chen said.
A key focus for the Applications Committee is to enable cloud applications to interact with the network via MEF’s LSO (Lifecycle Service Orchestration) framework using a set of machine-to-machine APIs. MEF says this will ensure that application-level quality of experience, security, and performance requirements can be met by the underlying network infrastructure using LSO Artificial Intelligence analytics and automation without human intervention.
Work to integrate IMTC into the MEF fold is already underway. The Applications Committee is incorporating active work of IMTC, including the IoT and Real-Time Media (RTM SDN) working groups and other work areas. Application sub-groups will deliver various automation use cases, building upon those already published by IMTC.
To support a higher level of abstraction interaction between applications and networks, an Intent Work Area initially will start under the Applications Committee to collaboratively develop a common, multivendor, interoperable, intent-based set of LSO APIs, enabling networks to be treated as a programmable abstraction layer comprised of a closed-loop, black box model.