After working on it for two years, MEF – an association of more than 200 companies, mostly vendors and service providers, located in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Middle East / Africa – finally ratified its SD-WAN standard (MEF-70).
[MEF-70 defines] requirements for an application-aware, over-the-top WAN connectivity service that uses policies to determine how application flows are directed over multiple underlay networks irrespective of the underlay technologies or service providers who deliver then.
MEF-70 Statement
Puuh, well said, but – yeah – that’s a very precies definition of SD-WAN in my opinion. Pascal Menezes, MEF CTO states, the standard is not about technology specifications or protocol, but based on behavior:
It describes the behavioral model, not the implementation, … We never describe implementation because every vendor wants to take the behavior and do their own implementation on it.
Pascal Menezes, CTO of MEF
For more information, the MEF 3.0 SD.WAN Service Definition is a good point of information, too.