MEF Announces 8 Service Providers Production Ready for LSO Sonata APIs

MEF has announced that eight leading service providers are on track to be production-ready in 2Q 2020 for deploying MEF 3.0 LSO Sonata APIs to automate ordering of MEF 3.0 Carrier Ethernet Access E-Line services.

Of this pioneering group, five already have implemented LSO Sonata APIs in production environments and three expect to be ready for deployment before the end of Q2 2020. Multiple other service providers have informed MEF that they intend to implement LSO Sonata APIs in the second half of 2020.

The eight service providers and one multi-national enterprise who have either implemented or expect to be production-ready with LSO Sonata APIs by the end of June 2020 include:

AT&T
Bestel
Bloomberg
Colt Technology Services
HGC Global Communications
Infonas
PCCW Global
Sparkle
Telefónica International Wholesale Services

“More than 50 global and regional service providers are at various stages of evaluation, demonstration, production readiness, and implementation of LSO Sonata APIs to enable frictionless inter-provider commerce,” said Nan Chen, President, MEF. “We congratulate this outstanding group of production-ready service providers who are committed to implementing MEF 3.0 LSO Sonata APIs to improve overall customer experience. Their collective efforts represent a major leap forward in accelerating industry transformation to dynamic, assured, and certified services across a global federation of automated networks.”

LSO Sonata APIs

MEF is standardizing LSO Sonata APIs as part of a comprehensive effort to standardize multiple sets of LSO APIs enabling service automation across providers and network technology domains. LSO Sonata APIs relate to the interface reference point within the LSO Reference Architecture that supports automated business-to-business interactions between service providers.

The full suite of available and planned LSO Sonata APIs deals with serviceability (address validation, site queries, product offering qualification), product inventory, quoting, ordering, trouble ticketing, contracts, and billing.

Frictionless Commerce & Federated Networks

Implementation of LSO Sonata APIs enables service providers to transition from operating as independent islands to participating in a global federation of automated networks that will support dynamic inter-provider services with frictionless commerce. Combining MEF 3.0 LSO Sonata APIs with certified MEF 3.0 CE services offers a host of potential benefits, including:

Faster, efficient interconnection between retail and wholesale service provider partners
Automated ordering and provisioning
Accelerated service delivery with near-instantaneous cycle times
Faster time to revenue
Additional revenue from new orders due to improved customer experience
New revenue from on-demand/dynamic services.

“Automating inter-provider services with MEF 3.0 LSO Sonata APIs enables providers to rapidly deliver high-performance/on-demand data services that are available beyond the network footprint of any individual operator,” said Pascal Menezes, CTO, MEF. “Participation in the global federation creates an opportunity to provide higher margin, highly differentiated services that leave behind commoditized, low-margin fixed-bandwidth services.”

John Nolan, Vice President of Global Connections and Alliance Management, AT&T, said, “AT&T has been active in the MEF LSO Sonata API development from the start because we believe standardization of business application interoperability is a critical component in evolving the industry towards a cloud-like experience for telecoms services, building towards fully-automated networks that raise the bar for customer experience. We’re currently working with carriers in all regions and will share updates throughout 2020 as we connect our businesses using the Sonata APIs. We encourage our counterparts across the global telecoms industry to join us in driving implementation of the Sonata APIs, inter-connecting in an agile way and propagating an industry-wide many-to-many approach.”

Mirko Voltolini, Head of Network On Demand, Colt, explained, “Colt has been a key supporter and driver of the MEF LSO Sonata standard since its inception. We see this standard as being critical for the evolution of Colt’s On Demand offering, which allows customers to take full control of their network, by managing service quoting, activation and assurance all via an online portal or via APIs. The LSO Sonata standard allows us to extend the service beyond the Colt network boundaries onto third party carrier networks. We are excited to see what can be done as this standard continues to evolve, and we feel proud to have shown the transformative nature of the LSO Sonata APIs in our industry-first production deployment with AT&T.”

Mario Di Mauro, CEO, Sparkle, said, “Sparkle is a strong supporter of the evolution underway of the interaction process between partner carriers to accelerate time to market and improve customer experience. Having this clear objective, we are fully committed to implement Sonata APIs in production, for both seller and buyer roles, within June 2020. At the same time, we are actively working to empower selected partner providers with a plug & play Sonata-enabling technology to expand the ecosystem with the aim to offer customers a consistent experience throughout Sparkle’s extended footprint.”

Speaking on this development, Frederick Chui, Chief Commercial Officer, PCCW Global, explained, “We at PCCW Global are very pleased to be one of the first few services providers to have production-ready MEF 3.0 LSO Sonata APIs for serviceability, quoting and ordering of Ethernet services. These APIs are proving to be very useful when it comes to dealing with high volume transactional elements of the telecoms business. LSO Sonata APIs are vital in an inter-carrier, automated services environment where our customers are expecting to order and consume network services in real-time and on-demand, such as that offered by Console Connect. We foresee that a wider adoption of these standardized Sonata APIs would help the ICT community as a whole and pave the path to common information modeling and automated commercial settlements among them.”

Jacqueline Teo, Chief Digital Officer, HGC Global Communications, commented, “HGC is a firm believer in standards that drive consistent and repeatable collaboration between carriers. LSO Sonata enables HGC to access markets faster and to integrate our core platforms with other carriers to provide frictionless customer experience. Such seamless integration would enable HGC to achieve our vision of digital customer journeys, improve our productivity and further down the road, make inclusion of new business models possible.”

Rafik Shafik, CTO, Infonas, informed, "At Infonas, our focus has been on transforming and evolving our commercial interactions; and MEF's LSO Sonata has been our go-to framework for sales & B2B workflow automation. For us, it is not only about instant on-line quoting, but rather evolving to a flexible and sustainable business model to efficiently and rapidly deliver (or procure) connectivity to any location around the world.”