My API Story: Enabling interactions and ecosystems

Oracle's Group Vice President of Product Development, Azhar Mirza, explores how TM Forum’s Open APIs and Open Digital Architecture can help underpin digital transformation and enable communications service providers (CSPs) to increase their agility and the interoperability between their systems. Tell us about yourself and your job

I lead Oracle Communications Applications Product Management and Engineering. I’ve been in the communications industry for over two decades, leading strategy, solution consulting and software engineering, to deliver core business and operational systems. In my experience I have seen that successful communications service provider digital transformation requires the business agility provided by integrated application suites, flexibility provided by Open Digital Architecture, and operational agility provided by a secure Cloud platform. Our products are built on these principles and TMF Open Digital Architecture and TMF Open APIs are critical for us to provide the desired business outcomes to our customers. Why do you believe in TM Forum’s Open API program? Our service provider customers face significant challenges in competing with digital disruptors as well as their traditional market competitors. Their path to success relies on business and IT agility and the ability to quickly capitalize on emerging opportunities and new revenue streams. I believe that TM Forum’s Open APIs and Open Digital Architecture underpin digital transformation and are critical to enabling this agility and interoperability between systems. Oracle Communications is committed to providing open, standards-aligned solutions and we will continue to collaborate with our industry partners in defining these standards. What TM Forum Open APIs are most valuable to your company? Oracle provides comprehensive concept-to-cash-to-care solutions with standards-based open architecture spanning most of the Frameworx, therefore most TMF Open APIs are valuable and applicable to us. I’ll highlight a few that are particularly valuable to Oracle. The Shopping Cart API enables us to deliver omni-channel buying experiences to our customers and partners and provides a standard mechanism to support purchasing of services, packages, bundles, devices and accessories. The Customer Management API supports unified customer record creation, storage, retrieval and management across our portfolio, along with a common view of product inventory and agreements related to that customer. Product Order helps us deliver omni-channel ordering for subscriptions, one-time purchases and complex ordering scenarios. Product Inventory allows for omni-channel retrieval of products owned by customers for self-care and agent-assisted care, triggers complex billing cycles, and delivers key capabilities around ownership transfer, suspends, and resumes. Product Catalog enables rapid offer design, the capability to define services, bundles, visual attachments, and complex usage-driven pricing schemes. Those APIs align well with our product initiatives and provide us with a modern framework that accelerates our product development cycles across our portfolio and supports our addressing the very specific, complex needs of the communications industry. Much of our core value proposition is supported by our use of the TM Forum Open APIs. How do you use them? They are foundational to our API-first product strategy. We use them to facilitate efficient communication between products within our broad portfolio. For example, we use the Product Catalog API to expose catalog data to runtime storefront sales and billing systems and the Product Ordering API to communicate between our commerce and order fulfillment. In addition, our consulting organization and partner community use the APIs to easily implement our products within heterogeneous customer environments. How have you benefited from using these APIs? The APIs benefit Oracle, our customers, and our industry. Oracle benefits because the TMF Open APIs provide us agility in product development, reference integration architecture, extensibility and improved application lifecycle management. We have always been at the forefront of TM Forum open standards, with the first-ever Frameworx-certified solution and many contributions to eTOM, SID and ODA. This leadership makes us a trusted partner for our customers – who are increasingly requesting these APIs - and maintains our reputation for excellence. Our customers benefit from improved integration and interoperability within heterogenous environments, low-code extensibility of our SaaS solutions, and greater agility to quickly launch and monetize new real-time, on-demand services. And as our industry undergoes great transformation, I believe that the APIs are critical to enabling interactions and ecosystems that can drive new business models to ensure financial success in the 5G era.

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