My API Story: Empowering agility and flexibility for partnerships

We spoke to Antonio González Kirchenmayer, CTO of the OSS Product Division at Satec who explained how TM Forum Open APIs are bringing value to its customers by enabling a digital ecosystem that can bring future B2B opportunities.

Tell us about yourself and your job I have +10 years of experience working at Satec as an Applications Architect. I bring value to customers in multiple industries such as public administration and utilities, but I am mainly focused in the telco sector. In the last year, I was named Alvatross’ CTO, an operations support systems (OSS) product-oriented division inside Satec. Currently in my role as CTO I am leveraging all that experience to build high value and quality OSS products for communications service providers (CSPs). My daily work involves building new roadmap requisites, pre-sales support, architecture definition, solution design, partnerships and customer interaction. I am passionate and committed to my job because I just love technology and all the challenges that come with it. Alvatross is an OSS product-oriented division inside Satec. We merge both an integrator and a product approach with a deep technical and commercial knowledge of CSP’s systems and networks. Satec is an end-to-end system integrator with more than 30 years of experience and more than 50 OSS integration projects in more than 40 clients. Why do you believe in TM Forum’s Open API program? In the age of digital ecosystems, TM Forum’s Open API program is a magnificent tool to break the integration barriers that block digital transformation among CSPs. Also, a key success factor of the program is its practical approach presenting Open APIs as a toolbox with specifications, reference implementations and conformance test kits. This facilitates a rapid implementation of APIs that contribute to build agile cost-effective solutions to facilitate customer interoperability. What TM Forum Open APIs are most valuable to your company? Both as a software vendor (Alvatross) and as a system integrator (Satec) all Open APIs are valuable to us, but these are the most relevant ones: Why did you choose to highlight those APIs? Our OSS product core is order management, so the most relevant APIs are those related to product/service orders and catalog due to our catalog-driven approach. How do you use the APIs? Open APIs are the preferred integration mechanism among our products and solutions. Many of these APIs are either provided or consumed by our products so that we offer a high level of interoperability. Frequently we are involved on OSS and business support system (BSS) transformation projects where we act both as a vendor and as a systems integrator. In these situations, integrations can be either a straightforward Open API integration or not. In case the third-party interface is not an Open API, we adapt those interfaces to Open APIs. This is very beneficial for us and for our customers because it dramatically reduces costs of present and future integrations, speeds up the project and brings value to our customers by enabling a digital ecosystem that can bring future B2B opportunities. How have you benefited from using the Open APIs? TM Forum’s Frameworx, and especially Open APIs, have boosted our products’ design to a state-of-the-art microservice architecture. Furthermore, building our products in that way also paves the road to the upcoming transition into the Open Digital Architecture (ODA). Also, the use of Open APIs contributed to the internal and external alignment (with customers and partners) of our solutions providing a common language and understanding. This empowers us to be more agile and flexible in the search of win-win partnerships that bring best-of-breed solutions to our customers. Where do you use them? We have OSS customers in more than 10 countries, but our most important customers for our order management products are in EMEA (Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Algeria, Angola and Namibia). Have you used them in conjunction with any other APIs? Apart from implementing multiple Open APIs we also consume several of them in our integrations with other BSS and OSS systems, specifically:

• TMF620 - Product Catalog API
• TMF622 - Product Ordering API
• TMF633 - Service Catalog API
• TMF638 - Service Inventory API
• TMF641 - Service Ordering Management API
• TMF649 - Service Activation and Configuration API
• TMF632 - Party Management API
• TMF637 - Product Inventory Management API
• TMF673 - Geographic Address Management API

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