IMTC becomes part of MEF Applications Committee

MEF, the driving force enabling agile, assured, and orchestrated services, is integrating the International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium (IMTC) into its new Applications Committee. As part of this transaction, all assets of IMTC will be transferred to MEF and active work will be carried on within MEF. 

The objective of the Applications Committee is to ultimately enable cloud applications to dynamically interact with the network via MEF’s lifecycle service orchestration (LSO) framework using machine-to-machine APIs. This ensures that application-level quality of experience, security, and performance requirements can be met by the underlying network infrastructure using LSO artificial intelligence analytics and automation.

The Applications Committee began formal work in October, led by MEF CTO Pascal Menezes. Co-chairs will be selected in the coming months. IMTC member companies that are not already members of MEF will become MEF principal members. 

“As more and more enterprises move their applications to the cloud, there is a need to ensure that cloud applications deliver a high-quality, frictionless end-user experience,” said Nan Chen, President, MEF. “We consider this expansion of our scope of work a natural extension of our MEF 3.0 transformational service framework enabling agile, assured, and orchestrated services across a global ecosystem of automated networks.”

MEF’s applications work will be closely aligned with the focus of MEF 3.0:

· Agile – Enable networks to be programmed by cloud applications for a given set of autonomic behaviours such that control, visibility, and performance guarantees can be realised in an on-demand and almost real-time manner.

· Assured – Enable networks to deliver on cloud application performance objectives, availability, security, and middle box interoperability using automation principles.

· Orchestrated – Enable networks that are inter-connected from device-to-the-cloud to be orchestrated, automated, and coordinated for a given set of network connectivity, service, and performance objectives.

“IMTC’s mission was to promote and facilitate the development and use of interoperable, real-time, multimedia telecommunications products and services based on open standards, and the MEF’s infrastructure and industry leadership made it the logical home for this work moving forward,” said Anatoli Levine, President, IMTC and Director of Products and Standards for Softil. 

Levine said the new committee will work closely with the network operator community and broader ecosystem to ensure seamless integration of cloud-centric applications in modern service infrastructures. "IMTC members are also looking forward to enhancing the content of IMTC’s annual flagship SuperOp interoperability testing event by utilising MEF LSO APIs to dynamically control interaction of multimedia applications with the delivery network.”

“With our new Applications Committee, we’re tackling some of the most complex and fundamental issues facing our industry today,” said Menezes. “This is an exciting time for MEF as we expand the range and reach of our work to encompass the application layer of the network, bring in new members, and help shape the structure of next-generation networks.”

The Applications Committee is incorporating active work of IMTC, including that of the Internet of Things (IoT) and real-time media (RTM SDN) working groups and other work areas. Application subgroups will deliver various automation use cases, building upon those already published by IMTC. In addition, to support a higher level of abstraction interaction between applications and networks, an Intent Work Area initially will start under the Applications Committee to collaboratively develop a common, multivendor, interoperable, intent-based set of LSO APIs, enabling networks to be treated as a programmable abstraction layer comprised of a closed-loop, black box model.

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View the MEF 3.0 launch video