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        Touting Azure for Operators, Microsoft Joins SDN Standards Group
        
        
        
			- By Kurt Mackie
- October 27, 2020
As part of its Azure for Operators program, Microsoft this week joined a nonprofit standards  association that focuses on software-defined networking (SDN)  technologies used by enterprises and service providers. 
MEF, which counts 200 companies as its members, in turn  appointed  Shawn Hakl, a Microsoft partner executive on 5G strategy, as an MEF advisory  director. MEF's board heavily  represents telco and Internet service providers, such as AT&T, Comcast, Ericsson,  Orange and Verizon.
"Microsoft's decision to join MEF aligns with key  goals of our Microsoft Azure for Operators initiative to bring the power of the  cloud to the network, unlock the potential of 5G, and drive down costs and  create new services and business models," Hakl said in a released  statement.
Hakl formerly served as a senior vice president for  business products at Verizon with a focus on edge computing and 5G services  before joining Microsoft in March.
Microsoft's MEF membership follows its somewhat recent  moves into the carrier and service provider markets, offering edge computing  and SDN technologies to telcos. For instance, its Azure datacenter compute and  storage capabilities were recently touted  as a "carrier-grade platform."
To that end, Microsoft this year acquired Affirmed  Networks and Metaswitch  Networks.  Both companies specialized in SDN support for carriers, especially as they upgrade  mobile networks and add 5G wireless services. 
The MEF is currently focused on nine projects covering software-defined  wide area network (SD-WAN) and secure access service edge (SASE) efforts. It  has efforts on developing specs for SD-WAN service attributes, application  security, performance monitoring and testing, as well as "universal"  edge networking aspects, for instance. 
There's also a project on standardizing SASE  services and attributes. MEF's Lifecycle  Service Orchestration framework aims to accelerate automation between  service provider networks and enterprise networks via standardization. 
MEF lays claim to having published "the industry's  first global standard defining an SD-WAN service and its service attributes"  back in July 2019, according to an "MEF 3.0 SD-WAN Services" FAQ document. The combination of  SD-WAN use with standardization will make it easier for " a wide  range of ecosystem stakeholders to use the same terminology when buying, selling, assessing, deploying, and delivering SD-WAN  services," the FAQ contended. 
Microsoft is expected to contribute specifically to the "MEF  3.0 SD-WAN and SASE standards," per MEF's announcement. 
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
            
        
        
                
                    About the Author
                    
                
                    
                    Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.