To bolster more input from the vendor community, industry organization MEF has created a Technology Advisory Board (TAB).

Pascal Menezes, CTO of MEF, says the majority of the group's board is comprised of elected service provider representatives. He says that the organization wants to give its technology supplier members more of a voice in MEF's strategic vision around cybersecurity, business automation, SD-WAN, connectivity and edge computing.

"We thought about, 'how can we make it so that technology vendors can also have a say, in the strategic direction of MEF?' And that's kind of where we came up with the idea to create this Technology Advisory Board," says Menezes.

MEF's board is almost entirely service providers, including executives from Verizon, Comcast Business, PCCW Global, Lumen, Sparkle, Orange Business Services, AT&T Business, Colt Technology Services and Bell Canada. The only vendor members are Microsoft and the president of MEF, Nan Chen, who is also head of The One Network for Ericsson.

MEF says that the new advisory board will augment its board of directors. The TAB is comprised of senior executives from Blue Planet, Cisco, Fortinet, Netcracker Technology, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Spirent, Versa Networks and VMware. The members represent cloud, network and technology providers in addition to SD-WAN and SASE suppliers that share the goal of "helping the ecosystem more quickly develop and bring to market leading-edge services and solutions," says MEF.

Menezes says TAB members will serve a one-year term and meet on a quarterly basis with the full board to have technical and strategic conversations. The TAB currently has about ten members and will add more representation from the edge computing area in the future, adds Menezes.

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— Kelsey Kusterer Ziser, Senior Editor, Light Reading