Last March 2021, I’ve started my new journey in ETSI MEC, taking over the Chair position from my friend Alex Reznik (HPE). Sure, of course I’m not a “beginner” in this group (as most of you who know me can appreciate that I’m there in the MEC Leadership Team since the beginning of the Phase 1!). Nonetheless, given the great work done together in these amazing years in collaboration with all MEC stakeholders, I’m grateful of the trust of many companies who elected me and expressed their warm support in my new role.

Thus, in my first blog post, I would like to share these amazing 100 days in ETSI MEC. Indeed, we had a great start of MEC Phase 3, coinciding with the start my chairship. Let me emphasize the “WE”, as this is really a well engaged ecosystem of stakeholders. First of all, after my election, I had the pleasure to see the establishment of our new MEC Leadership Team, with Walter Featherstone (Samsung), Alice Li (Huawei) and Pekka Kuure (Nokia) as my vice-chairs, and also with Debashish Purkayastha (InterDigital) as DECODE WG vice-chair (in support of Walter).

Additionally, in these amazing days, not only the impressive MEC membership continued to grow at a fast pace across the whole ecosystem (both with new small and big players), but also the amount of active members and delegates showed a great level of engagement (often breaking the famous “Pareto rule”, that usually 20% of the people is doing the 80% of the job 😉). We published a white paper on MEC security, in collaboration with ETSI NFV and TC CYBER experts, as a first initiative in the domain. This was also leading to the organization of a MEC Day at the forthcoming ETSI Security Week (NB: you can consider attending the MEC Session that I will have the pleasure to moderate), and the creation of a new Work Item on MEC security. We are also ramping up the collaboration with LF Edge Akraino, to increase the adoption of MEC APIs by developers, and planning further MEC Hackathons. We are strengthening the cooperation with 5GAA, that nominated its observers to MEC, due to their interest from the automotive domain. In ETSI MEC we nominated our observers to GSMA OPG, for a better and closer collaboration on MEC Federation aspects: in fact, we have completed the MEC 035 Study on Inter-MEC systems and MEC-Cloud systems coordination, that led to the creation of MEC 041 for the normative work on MEC Federation APIs, to address GSMA OPG requirements, also in alignment with 3GPP (NB: stay tuned on this MEC Federation, there will be nice updates soon on this hot topic! ). In this period I had also the pleasure to be invited to many international events, including the “Next-Generation IoT and Edge Computing Strategy Forum” organized by the European Commission.

Finally, other nice initiatives are under preparation, and new MEC deliverables will be published soon.  Well, …I don’t want to reveal too much today, also to increase your curiosity... and encourage you to read my next blog post!