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Val Vaduva, CTO at Enghouse Networks discusses how TM Forum's APIs are helping the company to integrate seamlessly with existing OSS deployments on its customer sites.
My API Story: Building next generation OSS solutions
Val Vaduva, CTO at Enghouse Networks discusses how TM Forum's APIs are helping the company to integrate seamlessly with existing OSS deployments on its customer sites.
Tell us about yourself and your job I am a people-focused, commercially minded Chief Technology Officer with over 20 years’ experience within the telecoms industry. As the CTO at Enghouse Networks, I am responsible for leading a comprehensive telecommunication portfolio of products; defining the product roadmaps to underpin the wider company strategy. Why do you believe in TM Forum’s Open API program? TM Forum’s Open APIs are an excellent source of industry proven standards, built on the concept of collaboration. We see a lot of potential for them to be scalable and extendible based on evolving networks. TM Forum manages to bring together various CSPs and vendors to come up with common standards which will allow inter-operability. Without them it would be difficult to manage such complex heterogeneous networks. What TM Forum Open APIs are most valuable to your company? The following are the Open APIs we are in the process of using within our products: Why did you choose to highlight those APIs? Enghouse Networks offers a complete product portfolio that spans across telecoms OSS and BSS for next generation communication and media service providers and telecommunications businesses around the globe. With the support of TM Forum’s Open APIs, we will integrate seamlessly with existing OSS deployments on our customer sites. Building next generation OSS solutions, without a proper standard in place, poses challenges in communicating with heterogenous vendors, technologies and frameworks. How do you use those APIs? Our Enghouse Networks team currently refers to and utilizes the out of the box Open API definitions, with minor changes. The changes we proposed are aimed to support data aggregation and searchability within the APIs. For instance, the Alarm Management API supports alarmFind with just fields in them, we added additional APIs to support lucene based searchability, which is very friendly when it comes to building a proper query with plain English text. We also added the alarm aggregation endpoint that would help us to return aggregated results like count by severity, count by probable cause etc… How have you benefited from using the APIs? Open APIs are crucial for our integration in the Catalyst project SINA: Speech interpretation network assistant. This way, when we communicate with the OSS systems through voice commands we convert that to Open API calls that will be used to respond back to the users. We are also proposing next generation OSS architecture that segregates data and functions, where the data would be the data generated by various systems like EMS’s, system logs, CDRs etc. Functions are EMS, NMS, Performance Manager, Fiber planning management, Inventory management etc. Where do you use them? We are in the process of adhering to the Open APIs ,which means that we plan to see most of our customers moving to using Open APis in the next 6-12 months.
