Just like the company, I have a “hybrid” background in both telecom (Whale Cloud) and dot com (Alibaba). Now as the CTO of Whale Cloud International, my major concerns are to build an open digital platform and achieve
DevOps in the hybrid cloud environment, which are much more challenging than the situation of dot com companies. The digital journey of traditional telcos is always stuck by reasons like heavy IT legacies, complex internal collaboration, outdated supplier relationship models, and even culture. Thus, I am interested in helping our clients overcome these challenges by providing them the best technology-empowered approaches.
Why do you believe in TM Forum’s Open API program?TM Forum’s Open API Program is a quite innovative idea that brings all parties together and creates outstanding benefits for the entire value chain. As one of the major players in the global market, Whale Cloud always embraces openness, from technical architectures to business models. Open and standard APIs make the decoupling of front-end and back-end possible, drive interoperability and accelerate business innovation in a digital era.
TM Forum’s Open APIs solve the problem of heavy integration in a heterogeneous IT environment, which will be especially valuable in this fragmented market. And the similar approach has been proven in the Chinese market, in which major telcos and vendors collaboratively work on the open API standards to solve the interoperating challenges in building a digital native BSS/OSS platform.
What TM Forum Open APIs are most valuable to your company?As a global BSS/OSS software vendor, Whale Cloud needs to cope with various integrations among different telcos. Thus, all relevant APIs are valuable for us. The catalog-related APIs, trouble ticket APIs, and order related APIs are especially useful in some recent projects.
Why did you choose to highlight those APIs?It depends on the particular integration architecture of actual projects. Based on our recent practice, it would be very common for a BSS/OSS core product vendor to integrate with existing channel applications, or third-party trouble ticketing.
How do you use the APIs?ZSmart D-BEP, the BSS/OSS suite, leverages these APIs as a standard way of external and internal integration. For example, the integration between ZSmart Service Catalog with either ZSmart or 3rd-party product catalog and service ordering module.
Besides, we also adopt the Open APIs as one of the prerequisites of product planning and designing, ensuring the latest upgrade of the products are standard-aligned and easy for deployment.
Where do you use them?Orange (Cameroon, Congo), MTN (Rwanda)
How have you benefited from using these APIs?One major benefit is the lower cost to communicate with third parties by using the common information model. This is especially effective in the international telecom software market, a competitive market with many different types of vendors. And most telcos lack the power to set standards for vendors to follow, which greatly increase the cost of BSS/OSS transformation projects.
Have you used them in conjunction with any other APIs?Whale Cloud provides end-to-end solutions covering the whole business processes from order to payment, in which a set of Open APIs will be used in product ordering, product inventory, service ordering, service inventory, account management, payment management and so on.
