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South African systems integrator Globetom is using TM Forum Open APIs to help its telco customers transform their IT operations and develop “digital integration hubs”. Find out how.
How a layered architecture makes APIs easier to adopt
South African systems integrator Globetom is using TM Forum Open APIs to help its telco customers transform their IT operations and develop “digital integration hubs”. During a Global Architecture Forum webinar Thursday, Philip Stander, Group CEO of Globetom, explained how, stressing that API adoption needs to be part of a layered digital architecture. When a telco in the Middle East came to Globetom asking for the ability to add shipment tracking to its mobile money platform in order to differentiate its service from competitors’, Globetom turned to TM Forum’s suite of more than 50 REST-based APIs. Globetom recommended that the communications service provider (CSP) adopt the Shipment Tracking API (TMF684), which captures information about shipment status, checkpoints and arrival dates. For CSPs that use a variety of companies to deliver products on their behalf, the tracking API abstracts the complexity of partnership arrangements by providing a single interface for developers. Via the API, tracking information can be retrieved by providing an order ID or the shipping company’s tracking ID. This was an example of “customer pull innovation,” according to Stander.
“We keep ourselves open to customer pull, so that when a customer has a need, we make sure they know the TM forum Open APIs are being used as a reference base for us to guide how we expose APIs,” he explains.
Indeed, Globetom has been contributing to TM Forum’s Open API Collaboration Community since 2017 when the company led development of the TM Forum Loyalty Management API (TMF658), which helps CSPs implement and manage loyalty programs, including members, associated products and account balances. Since then the company has been actively helping CSPs adopt TM Forum APIs globally. In some cases, operators are implementing the APIs as part of digital transformation programs that include Globetom solutions, while in other cases they are asking Globetom to meet a specific need, as in the case of the Middle Eastern operator.
Stander advocates a layered architecture because layering helps CSPs put the APIs into context for different types of users (see graphic below). An internal specialist working on systems integration would have much more technical expertise and knowledge than, say, an external IoT app developer who is only focusing on an end user’s experience.
“Some of the feedback we got initially was that the comprehensiveness of the TM Forum APIs gets perceived as just being too complex,” Stander says. Layering addresses perceived complexity by contextualizing the experience of the people using the APIs.
Globetom has relied on TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture to develop this layering approach, with a goal of helping CSPs develop what Stander refers to as “digital integration hubs.” The foundation of this strategy is data science, or analytics, on top of which CSPs can build a customer data platform (see below). This must be shared across the entire business.
“If your customer data is segmented throughout the telco, you’re going to battle to really do personalized offerings and capture the business moment,” Stander explains. “You need you need to have accurate, real-time accessible customer records, and on top of that you need an agile integration platform – the Open APIs provide this integration platform.
“You can build the best customer-data science platform, but if you don’t have an agile platform to reach digital channels, you’re dead in the water in your digital transformation strategy,” he emphasizes.
To learn much more about Globetom’s approach, including Stander’s views on why adopting a microservices strategy is more complicated for telcos than it seems and why microservices architectures need to be married with “low-code” or “no-code” platforms, watch the full webinar on demand.
