LOS ANGELES -- The MEF has released a new white paper, Third Network Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) Vision, that identifies the essential service orchestration and management capabilities necessary to accelerate the communication’s industry shift toward dynamic “Third Network” services. The Third Network paradigm is characterized by agile and assured connectivity services that are orchestrated over more automated and interconnected networks powered by Carrier Ethernet 2.0, LSO, SDN, and NFV. These new communications services promise to offer a cloud-centric experience with unprecedented levels of user control over network resources, with connectivity orchestrated between both physical and virtual service endpoints and across multiple providers.

In collaboration with other industry standards organizations as part of the UNITE program, the MEF currently is defining LSO capabilities and supporting APIs to streamline and automate the entire network service lifecycle in a sustainable fashion. LSO encompasses all network domains that require coordinated end-to-end management and control to deliver on-demand connectivity services and to assure their overall quality and security.

As explained in the new LSO white paper, the MEF is defining functional requirements and APIs that support capabilities for fulfillment, control, performance, assurance, usage, security, analytics, and policy across multi-operator networks. This approach overcomes existing complexity by defining service abstractions that hide the complexity of underlying technologies and network layers from the applications and users of the services.

Nan Chen, President of the MEF, explains:
“The convergence of LTE, Cloud, SDN, and NFV has the potential to revolutionize the delivery of services over interconnected networks, but it demands end-to-end service orchestration. This is why LSO is a key focus for the MEF in 2015. It is critical to the development of the Third Network Vision.”

Erin Dunne, Director of Research Services, Vertical Systems Group, said:
“Enterprise customers are increasingly demanding quick turn-up of carrier-class services with value-added feature sets. No single service provider has the footprint reach to address these requirements across all customer locations. The MEF’s LSO framework aims to streamline the deployment of end-to-end, enhanced business class services over multi- provider, multi- technology networks.”

Michael Strople, Director and Chairman, MEF and President, Allstream, said:
“Over the next year, the MEF will be working on new developments in SDN and NFV and creating a level of standardization for defining LSO. It is an exciting phase that will lead to a big shift in how services are offered to customers and will change the communications and network technology industries in significant and far-reaching ways.”

Ken Countway, Vice President of Network Architecture, Comcast Corporation, said:
“The industry has been filled with excitement about the prospect of delivering highly customized, on-demand services over much more efficient, automated networks. As we move toward this goal, network operators need LSO capabilities and supporting APIs in place to overcome operational support system (OSS) challenges that stand in the way of realizing the full benefits of SDN- and NFV-enabled networks.”

Samuel Koetter, Sr. Product Manager, Ethernet and Cloud Services, XO Communications, commented:
“Defining LSO capabilities and APIs will lead to network efficiency, service agility, improved customer service, and increased customer control - an enabled Third Network vision.”

The Third Network Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) Vision white paper follows the release of the landmark MEF Third Network Vision & Strategy white paper in November 2014. These are the first of several planned papers and reports related to the Third Network and LSO that will be published throughout the coming year.

MEF