My API Story: Conformance certified APIs
Sajan Joy Thomas, Vice President at Tecnotree's Product Office explains how the company is using TM Forum's Open APIs across large and small CSP operations around the world.
27 Jan 2021
My API Story: Conformance certified APIs
Sajan Joy Thomas, Vice President at Tecnotree's Product Office explains how the company is using TM Forum's Open APIs across large and small CSP operations around the world.
Tell us about yourself and your job
With about two decades of overall experience in the telecoms industry, I started my journey with Tecnotree in 2004 playing critical roles in business and digital transformation, solution consulting including presales, portfolio management and solution architecture, delivery and managed services and have worked across geographic regions such as EMEA, APAC and LATAM.
I currently head the Product Office focusing on portfolio management which includes building the portfolio roadmap in-line with industry imperatives. In addition, I work with key communications service providers (CSPs) globally and advise them on digital business transformation and the development of new and disruptive business models.
Why do you believe in TM Forum’s Open API program?
With more than 75 world leading CSPs and vendors signing the Open API Manifesto by 2020, TM Forum Open APIs have already become the de facto standard in the telecom industry. This clearly demonstrates the outcome of the collaboration among the community of TM Forum members across different domains and businesses who have arrived at standardized specifications that all of us can and should leverage.
With the flexibility and ease of use of TM Forum’s Open APIs across different business models and with the adoption from industries such as IoT, we understand that TM Forum’s Open APIs are the future of enterprise architecture for orchestrating innovative use cases that will continue to empower digitally connected communities.
What TM Forum Open APIs are most valuable to your company?
We believe that Open APIs are of utmost value to our products and customers and as part of Tecnotree’s Digital BSS Suite 5 portfolio, especially:
Why did you choose to highlight those APIs?
These APIs help us in exposing our core portfolio capabilities in a generic manner. They have helped us to capture and provide business critical user-journeys in the areas of Lead-to-Quote, Quote-to-Order, and Order-to-Cash processes in line with TM Forum’s Information Framework (SID) data models in a simplified manner for our Digital BSS Suite 5 products.
One specific component that we would want to highlight is the Catalog Driven Order Management and fulfillment process, which not only simplified the customer onboarding journey by making it very generic and industry agnostic, but also improved the service execution and service enablement in a much streamlined and automated manner. This, in turn, helped our customers to improve their time-to-market and customer satisfaction.
How do you use the APIs?
Conforming to Open APIs has automatically translated into providing seamless interoperability within the Tecnotree Digital BSS Suite 5 products as well as other 3rd party products compliant to Open APIs in a CSP ecosystem using a common language. We are not only using these APIs to enable CSPs to focus on core telco service capabilities but also to fight disruption by enabling new micro to macro ecosystems and business cases by leveraging TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA) guidelines.
With the advent of 5G and opening-up of BSS assets using a Digital Business Ecosystem to leverage new business models, we believe that Open APIs with dynamic connectivity capabilities will help in enabling new partnerships for digital service providers (DSPs) to onboard innovative services for their retail and enterprise customers.
How have you benefited from using the Open API?
There have been tangible benefits such as cross industry-recognized APIs enablement in the products, intangible benefits in terms of reduced operational overheads for interoperability and the digital maturity that we have reaped with the usage of not only the Open APIs but also by adhering to the Business Process Framework (eTOM) processes in our Digital BSS Suite 5.
TM Forum Open APIs also present an excellent platform to design microservices. Bundling microservices with cloud-native technologies presents the ability to rapidly compose solutions curtailed to the needs of the business.
In addition, we are also able to scale up the Enterprise Solution Framework to various market segments (retail, mobile virtual network enabler/operator, corporate and enterprise) and the fulfilment of different business models related to B2C, B2B, B2B2X for our customers and their partner ecosystem.
Where do you use them?
We currently have six live and under deployment projects across LATAM, Middle East and African regions where these Open APIs are used with large and small CSP operations.
With about two decades of overall experience in the telecoms industry, I started my journey with Tecnotree in 2004 playing critical roles in business and digital transformation, solution consulting including presales, portfolio management and solution architecture, delivery and managed services and have worked across geographic regions such as EMEA, APAC and LATAM.
I currently head the Product Office focusing on portfolio management which includes building the portfolio roadmap in-line with industry imperatives. In addition, I work with key communications service providers (CSPs) globally and advise them on digital business transformation and the development of new and disruptive business models.
Why do you believe in TM Forum’s Open API program?
With more than 75 world leading CSPs and vendors signing the Open API Manifesto by 2020, TM Forum Open APIs have already become the de facto standard in the telecom industry. This clearly demonstrates the outcome of the collaboration among the community of TM Forum members across different domains and businesses who have arrived at standardized specifications that all of us can and should leverage.
With the flexibility and ease of use of TM Forum’s Open APIs across different business models and with the adoption from industries such as IoT, we understand that TM Forum’s Open APIs are the future of enterprise architecture for orchestrating innovative use cases that will continue to empower digitally connected communities.
What TM Forum Open APIs are most valuable to your company?
We believe that Open APIs are of utmost value to our products and customers and as part of Tecnotree’s Digital BSS Suite 5 portfolio, especially:
- Customer collection of APIs
- Customer Engaged Party collection of APIs
- Engaged Party collection of APIs
- Product collection of APIs
- Resource collection of APIs
- Part of Common collection of APIs
- Part of Standalone collection of APIs
Why did you choose to highlight those APIs?
These APIs help us in exposing our core portfolio capabilities in a generic manner. They have helped us to capture and provide business critical user-journeys in the areas of Lead-to-Quote, Quote-to-Order, and Order-to-Cash processes in line with TM Forum’s Information Framework (SID) data models in a simplified manner for our Digital BSS Suite 5 products.
One specific component that we would want to highlight is the Catalog Driven Order Management and fulfillment process, which not only simplified the customer onboarding journey by making it very generic and industry agnostic, but also improved the service execution and service enablement in a much streamlined and automated manner. This, in turn, helped our customers to improve their time-to-market and customer satisfaction.
How do you use the APIs?
Conforming to Open APIs has automatically translated into providing seamless interoperability within the Tecnotree Digital BSS Suite 5 products as well as other 3rd party products compliant to Open APIs in a CSP ecosystem using a common language. We are not only using these APIs to enable CSPs to focus on core telco service capabilities but also to fight disruption by enabling new micro to macro ecosystems and business cases by leveraging TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA) guidelines.
With the advent of 5G and opening-up of BSS assets using a Digital Business Ecosystem to leverage new business models, we believe that Open APIs with dynamic connectivity capabilities will help in enabling new partnerships for digital service providers (DSPs) to onboard innovative services for their retail and enterprise customers.
How have you benefited from using the Open API?
There have been tangible benefits such as cross industry-recognized APIs enablement in the products, intangible benefits in terms of reduced operational overheads for interoperability and the digital maturity that we have reaped with the usage of not only the Open APIs but also by adhering to the Business Process Framework (eTOM) processes in our Digital BSS Suite 5.
TM Forum Open APIs also present an excellent platform to design microservices. Bundling microservices with cloud-native technologies presents the ability to rapidly compose solutions curtailed to the needs of the business.
In addition, we are also able to scale up the Enterprise Solution Framework to various market segments (retail, mobile virtual network enabler/operator, corporate and enterprise) and the fulfilment of different business models related to B2C, B2B, B2B2X for our customers and their partner ecosystem.
Where do you use them?
We currently have six live and under deployment projects across LATAM, Middle East and African regions where these Open APIs are used with large and small CSP operations.
To learn more about TM Forum Open APIs visit www.tmforum.org/open-apis
