MEF Establishes Technology Advisory Board

MEF, a global industry association of network, cloud, and technology providers accelerating enterprise digital transformation, at its quarterly members meeting in Paris, France, announced the launch of a Technology Advisory Board (TAB).

Comprised of senior executives from leading global technology companies, the TAB augments the leadership and expertise of MEF’s world-class board of directors and brings important technology provider perspectives to the strategic work of MEF.

MEF established the TAB to incorporate input from all key stakeholder communities—cloud, network and technology providers—with a goal of helping the ecosystem more quickly develop and bring to market leading-edge services and solutions. TAB members will serve a one-year term and were selected for their extensive industry leadership in MEF’s strategic areas—cybersecurity, business automation, SD-WAN, underlay connectivity, and edge computing. The TAB initially will focus on increasing efficiencies and opportunities within the member ecosystem and supply chain to more quickly generate revenue.

The Technology Advisory Board consists of ten industry luminaries:

Kelly Ahuja, Chief Executive Officer, Versa Networks
Kailem Anderson, Vice President of Portfolio and Engineering, Blue Planet
Ari Banerjee, Senior Vice President Strategy, Netcracker Technology
Rohit Batra, Vice President and Head of Product, Telecommunications, Media & Technology, ServiceNow
Craig Connors, Vice President and General Manager, SASE Business, VMware
David Fan, Vice President and General Manager, Communications Industry, Salesforce
Sunil Khandekar, Former Founder & CEO of Nuage Networks, Independent
Dave Larson, Chief Technology Officer and General Manager, Cloud & IP, Spirent Communications plc
John Maddison, Executive Vice President of Products and Chief Marketing Officer, Fortinet
JL Valente, Vice President, Product Management, Enterprise Routing and SD-WAN, Cisco

“We are thrilled to welcome this inspiring group of executives with invaluable leadership and knowledge to MEF’s new Technology Advisory Board,” said Nan Chen, President, MEF. “For more than 20 years, MEF has been successful because of the extensive collaboration by its members and board leadership to help solve shared business challenges. Bringing in the technology perspective of the TAB further strengthens the industry collaboration that drives enterprise digital transformation through a better-together ecosystem of service, cloud, and technology providers.”

“The formation and launch of the TAB is an important step in meeting the needs of the entire digital services ecosystem,” said Pascal Menezes, Chief Technology Officer, MEF. “Honing MEF’s strategy with guidance from the vendor community about the way technologies enable services and products to be delivered and managed will enable us to advance fully automated transformational offerings with the goal of helping our members realize revenue faster.”

LSO Partner Conference

Also taking place in Paris, MEF is hosting the first-ever LSO Partner Conference on May 4. The one-day conference brings together business leaders and implementers from service provider, cloud, and technology companies to meet and network with buyers and sellers in the LSO Sonata community to accelerate adoption, hear business and technical perspectives from industry leaders who are driving LSO adoption, and learn about the LSO API roadmap, committee developments, and available tools, resources, and programs designed to speed up evaluation and implementation.

MEF LSO APIs are gaining industry traction as the standardized way to fast-track inter-provider commercial automation.