Tell us about yourself and your job As part of the product management team in MYCOM OSI, I drive the coordination and synergies across our ‘experience assurance and analytics
(tm)’ (EAA) suite of products, managing the service quality management and analytics product lines across a team of product and solution owners. This involves business case/strategy definition, roadmap, pre-sales engagements, functional detailing, architecture reviews, program management and customer interactions. I am also involved in strategic initiatives such as all
TM Forum Catalysts, the Open API program and
Open Digital Architecture, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) innovation, closed-loop automation and open source project initiatives such as
OSM and
ONAP.
I believe in TM Forum’s Open API program because….Open APIs are essential to building the orchestrated and autonomous networks of tomorrow. This will involve metadata driven automated fulfillment and assurance but also efficient training of AI/ML algorithms requiring API-based exchanges and data normalization. The program is a cornerstone to these evolutions.
What TM Forum Open APIs are most valuable to your company? As MYCOM OSI is very much in the assurance space we use some of the key assurance related Open APIs, such as Performance Management, Alarm Management, Problem Management and Trouble Ticketing. These are valuable to us.
Why did you choose to highlight those APIs?These APIs provide a normalization of data/exchanges for our EAA application exchanges but mostly with other applications where the API as an interface agreement is indisputable. Also, some of the TM Forum APIs such as Performance Management are agnostic to the entity layer which makes it very attractive to reuse at multiple integration points. It also provides a mechanism to discover metadata which fits our design-time approach and is very relevant in orchestrated networks with dynamic metadata definitions.
How do you use the APIs?
- The Performance Management API is used to subscribe to performance data collection from our SQM service designer and establishes collection schedules. It is also used as a northbound integration on top of our performance (PrOptima) and service quality management (ProAssure) product lines.
- The Alarm Management API is used as our normalization layer or API to our fault management (FM) ingestion and store between EAA applications and externally.
- The Problem Management API is used as part of our service impacting/problem management layer (ProAssure SQM)
- The Trouble Ticketing (TT) is used as our ticketing normalization layer and access to the TT Store across all the EAA products.
For all the assurance events related APIs we have used the normalized payload schema to implement a kafka profile for streaming-based exchanges.
How have you benefited from using the Open APIs?We have had significant time savings for MYCOM OSI and for our CSP customers. Using these APIs saved us significant design and R&D time as the API definitions were already there. Also, in customer solution architecture design and project integration the reference to the APIs has the added benefit of reducing complexity and, most importantly, ambiguity which can be a major risk for integration project failure.
Where do you use them?The APIs and their modified versions are used as standard in all of our EAA suite of products which are deployed at tier 1 CSPs across the globe, for example at a CSP with 300m+ subscribers processing more than 3 billion data records per hour.
To read more stories of how our members are using TM Forum Open APIs, visit: https://www.tmforum.org/my-api-story/. 
