The NaaS Excellence Awards highlight innovation, collaboration, and industry leadership within the NaaS ecosystem.
The awards celebrate the latest advancements shaping the future of NaaS.
Awards Open: 1 May 2025
Entries Close: 26 June 2025
Finalists Announced: 2 September 2025
Winners Announced: 11 November 2025, at the GNE NaaS Excellence Awards Gala Dinner
Guidelines: Award Submission Guide PDF
Award Submissions: awards.MEF.net
Questions? Email [email protected]
Recognizes a bold and innovative vision for delivering NaaS in a plug-and-play, standards-based automated ecosystem. This includes a clear strategy and roadmap for offering essential and extended NaaS service features and integrating modular underlay and overlay components into customized solutions. The award highlights strong alignment with MEF’s NaaS vision, including a commitment to LSO-enabled transactions with ecosystem partners, and creative marketing that reinforces the transition toward cloud-like, on-demand services. Solutions do not need to be fully in production at the time of submission.
Global & Regional
Celebrates the service provider delivering the most advanced and comprehensive NaaS solution–seamlessly integrating on-demand connectivity, application assurance, cybersecurity, and multi-cloud networking. The winner demonstrates strong alignment with MEF’s NaaS framework, supporting both essential and extended NaaS service features through modular components and LSO-enabled automated transactions with enterprise customers and ecosystem partners. The award also recognizes leadership in ecosystem collaboration and commitment to leveraging standards-based, certified services and APIs wherever possible.
Recognizes the most compelling NaaS deployment delivered to an enterprise customer. This award highlights real-world adoption of NaaS solutions that demonstrate innovation, strong execution, and measurable business value. Entries should showcase how MEF-standardized technologies, APIs, or services were used to meet specific enterprise requirements and deliver tangible operational impact. Solutions may span industries such as finance, healthcare, retail, or manufacturing, and can reflect deployments across any global region.
Global & Regional
Honors the provider delivering the most advanced SASE solution, unifying SD-WAN, Zero Trust, and Security Service Edge (SSE) into a seamless offering. The award emphasizes customer value, scalability, and technical innovation–including robust cyber defense, centralized policy enforcement, and optimized application performance across multi-cloud environments. Special consideration is given to providers who leverage MEF-certified SD-WAN, ZT, and SSE technologies as the foundation of their SASE solution.
Global & Regional
Recognizes excellence in delivering SD-WAN services that are secure, application-aware, and policy-driven. The award emphasizes dynamic path selection, intelligent traffic management, performance-based application routing, and a consistent user experience across diverse network environments. Special consideration is given to providers who leverage MEF-certified SD-WAN technologies as the foundation of their SD-WAN solution.
Recognizes the industry-leading service provider that offers on-demand MEF 3.0 CE services that can be readily integrated into the plug-and-play NaaS networking ecosystem. Special consideration is given to providers who offer LSO-enabled CE, including automated quoting, ordering, etc.
Global & Regional
Celebrates leadership in LSO API-enabled automation of business and operational interactions with buyer or seller partners. Recognizes the service provider that has the largest number of current and planned implementations with partners in support of one or more service/product payloads (Carrier Ethernet, DIA, etc.)
Recognizes a technology vendor that plays a pivotal role in enabling NaaS through a forward-thinking approach and strategic alignment with MEF’s NaaS framework. This includes demonstrated product innovation, current and/or planned real-world implementations, and active engagement across the ecosystem. The award also highlights contributions to industry education and marketing that advance the adoption of standards-based, automated, and modular NaaS solutions.
Acknowledges the highest number of MEF LSO API implementations in commercial production between July 2024 and June 2025. Emphasizes support for real-world automation between providers.
Recognizes a technology vendor that enables service providers to transform customer engagement through MEF-aligned business automation. This includes support for LSO business APIs that automate functions such as address validation, quoting, product ordering, and more between buyers and sellers—accelerating time-to-revenue and enhancing user experience throughout the buying journey.
Honors a technology vendor delivering advanced automation capabilities that improve operational efficiency, agility, and service assurance for providers. The award highlights support for MEF LSO operational APIs that enable such functions as automated service ordering, service inventory, and performance monitoring in multi-partner environments.
Honors the technology provider delivering the most advanced SASE solution, unifying SD-WAN, Zero Trust, and Security Service Edge (SSE) into a seamless, integrated offering. The award emphasizes customer value, scalability, technical innovation, and real-world deployments. Special consideration is given to vendors offering MEF-certified SD-WAN, ZT, and SSE technologies that align with industry standards and accelerate secure digital transformation.
Recognizes a technology vendor that empowers customers with secure, application-aware, and policy-driven SD-WAN solutions. The award highlights advanced capabilities such as dynamic path selection, intelligent traffic management, performance-based application routing, and a consistent user experience across diverse network environments. Special consideration is given to vendors offering MEF-certified SD-WAN technologies with validated application performance, application classification/prioritization accuracy, and application assurance and protection.
Recognizes a technology vendor that empowers customers with advanced Security Service Edge (SSE) capabilities, including cloud-delivered security functions such as secure web gateway, firewall-as-a-service, CASB, DLP, and zero trust network access. The award highlights support for centralized policy enforcement, threat protection, and secure access across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Special consideration is given to vendors who provide MEF certified SSE technologies with validated protection against real-world threats, including exploits, evasions, and malware (proven capabilities that go beyond vendor data sheets).
Recognizes a technology vendor that empowers customers with Zero Trust solutions that deliver secure, identity-driven access across distributed environments. Special consideration is given to vendors offering MEF-certified Zero Trust technologies with the validated ability to deliver on promised components and capabilities of a ZT architecture approaches, including identity, device, and location context awareness, application/security policy granularity, SSL/TLS functionality and cipher support, and identity provider (IdP) and SSO integration.
Honors a group of two or more companies that have demonstrated exceptional collaboration in delivering a NaaS solution. This award recognizes joint efforts that span service providers, technology vendors, or ecosystem partners working together to deliver a cohesive, standards-based NaaS experience. The winner will showcase a real-world deployment or pilot that integrates MEF-standardized services, LSO APIs, or certifications—demonstrating interoperability, innovation, and meaningful business or operational impact. Special recognition is given to solutions that highlight the power of federation, partner-to-partner automation, or cross-domain orchestration.
Recognizes the industry executive who has exhibited exceptional leadership (vision, strategy, execution, collaboration, etc.) during the past year in driving industry transformation toward NaaS across an ecosystem of automated networks.
This memorial award recognizes an outstanding individual who has made a demonstratively positive impact in building a sense of community, sharing knowledge, and encouraging collaboration to create a better together industry. Examples of positive impact include a friendly, supportive approach to professional relationships, leadership in helping industry leaders tackle difficult challenges, meaningful contributions to hot topic projects, demonstrated willingness to engage with and mentor colleagues, and a positive attitude that inspires others.
Spotlights an outstanding MEF member professional who has demonstrated transformative leadership and innovation in advancing NaaS. This award honors an individual whose career achievements, pioneering projects, thought leadership, and community contributions have significantly impacted the evolution and adoption of NaaS across the industry.
