MUNICH -- Ethernet Europe 2012 -- Light Reading's Ethernet Europe 2012, taking place Tuesday and Wednesday, has its head in the clouds but its feet firmly planted in the reality of delivering Carrier Ethernet services.

Ethernet's role in enabling new cloud services ecosystems is a major feature of the first day of the annual event, which moved this year to Munich, in advance of the MEF meeting later this week. Four separate service provider keynotes and two panels will address the potential of cloud services but also the challenges in creating an on-demand network infrastructure to enable this next generation of services.

Cloud services are the focus here because delivering infrastructure as a service and software as a service may represent new revenue sources for service providers. But the cloud is already a crowded, competitive place, and service providers who want to persuade their access and transport service customers to also buy their cloud services have to be prepared to seamlessly knit those offerings together.

Since Carrier Ethernet is the networking option of choice, that means adapting its capabilities to meet the on-demand needs of cloud offerings -- and that's still a major challenge to network operators.

Speakers from AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T), Colt Technology Services Group Ltd , Equinix Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX) and other service providers will be talking cloud in the Carrier Ethernet context and should provide insight on the industry's progress on this crucial issue.

Ethernet Europe also will continue to address the core issues around Carrier Ethernet service delivery and performance, most notably the ongoing Operations, Administration and Maintenance challenges, which challenge service provider efforts to deliver end-to-end service management of Carrier Ethernet across multi-carrier, multi-vendor networks. Deployment of 100Gbit/s transport technology, the ongoing MPLS-TP debate, wholesale trends and mobile backhaul also return as agenda staples.

The perspective being provided on these issues and more will be coming largely from Europe's major operators: A record number of 21 service providers are participating as speakers. These include representatives from Deutsche Telekom AG (NYSE: DT), Colt, Telia Company , Broadnet Norge AS , euNetworks, GTS Central Europe , Interoute Communications Ltd. , and Belgacom SA (Euronext: BELG).

Coming on the heels of the MEF's Carrier Ethernet 2.0 initiative and just ahead of the MEF meeting, Ethernet Europe also represents an opportunity for discussion -- informal and formal -- of that effort and its goals of standardizing multiple classes of service (Multi-CoS), interconnection and manageability for Carrier Ethernet.

— Carol Wilson, Chief Editor, Events, Light Reading