Dan Pitt named Senior Vice President to accelerate MEF’s Third Network vision

BENGALURU: Los Angeles-located MEF, the driving force enabling agile, assured, and orchestrated Third Network services, has appointed Dan Pitt as Senior Vice President.

Pitt was former executive director of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) and a software-defined networking (SDN) visionary. Dr. Pitt’s mandate is to evangelize the MEF Third Network vision and technical program, harness SDNFV in the Lifecycle Services Orchestration (LSO) framework and open APIs, and expand the MEF community and ecosystem.

“Dan is a pioneer of the software-defined networking industry and has played a pivotal role in the evolution of SDN from concept to adoption,” states Nan Chen, President of MEF. “We are honored to welcome Dan to the MEF leadership team as we lead the transformation to agile, assured, and orchestrated network services on a global scale.”

“MEF has a critical mass of more than 200 members, including 130+ service providers, and an astonishing track record of spearheading the creation of an $80+ billion market of new services and technologies,” commented Dr Pitt. “Significantly, MEF members’ core competency of services, operations, and orchestration makes the organization the ideal vehicle to deliver real-world, global deployment of SDNFV and LSO. I am thrilled to be part of the innovative team MEF continues to build."

“Dan’s joining MEF reinforces the strength of MEF’s vision and strategy,” shares Axel Clauberg, Vice President, Aggregation, Transport, IP, at Deutsche Telekom, who served on the board of ONF during Pitt’s tenure there. “Dan has been the voice and the face of SDN since the movement’s inception. His decades of comprehensive networking industry experience complement MEF’s LSO and Third Network vision with both technical skills and extensive relationships around the world.”

“Dan’s extensive industry background puts him in an ideal position to help expand awareness of MEF’s vision of the Third Network and implement the advances being made in SDN/NFV into LSO’s framework and open APIs,” says Rohit Mehra, Vice President, Network Infrastructure, IDC. “In addition, Dan’s experience with open protocols and projects will also be beneficial as these get inducted into commercial platforms across operator networks in the coming years.”