The MEF has launched the Service Operations Committee (SOC), the organisation's first new committee in eight years, joining the existing technical, marketing and certification committees.
The purpose of the Service Operations Committee, which has widespread support from MEF members, is to "define, streamline and standardise processes for buying, selling, delivering and operating MEF-defined services". Allan Langfield (Comcast) and Shahar Steiff (PCCW Global) have been appointed as committee co-chairs.
For service providers, this new committee means more consistent contracts and clarification of different providers' capabilities, a standardised ordering process that takes into account national regulatory factors, as well as the greater diversity of Ethernet services over those of TDM services. In addition, service providers will benefit from accelerated negotiation and deployment of services.
"Our internal survey concluded that two thirds of our members favour the new committee and its associated benefits," said Ihab Tarazi, MEF chairman of the board and Verizon's vice-president of product technology. "Carrier Ethernet 2.0, and notably E-Access, have done a great deal to streamline the technical issues aligning wholesale carrier Ethernet services, and now it is time to bring the business processes into alignment. This is a significant development for the MEF and will require greater participation by higher-level executives with operational roles in addition to the technical contributions from MEF members."
The initial goal will be to increase the consistency of services available from providers and to reduce the number of service descriptions in contracts to simplify the purchasing process. The ordering process also will be simplified by greater global consistency among order field names and values. Service providers will benefit from the streamlined ordering process and reduced cost of providing the same information to different providers.
Wiki-based collaboration tools, online meetings and physical meetings will be used to encourage global participation in the working group.
"We have created this new team to explore how the MEF can facilitate the industry's implementation of Ethernet," said Nan Chen, president, MEF. "This is the MEF's second major initiative this year in addition to the newly launched CloudEthernet Forum that addresses the specific challenges of pure Ethernet cloud delivery across large and geographically dispersed data centres."