We spoke with Karthik T S, Head of the Centre of Excellence for Torry Harris Integration Solutions about how the company is using TM Forum Open APIs to enable its API management and digital marketplace product and helping it to substantially ease integration for its customers.
Ailis Claassen
03 Mar 2021
My API Story: Following an API-first strategy
We spoke with Karthik T S, Head of the Centre of Excellence for Torry Harris Integration Solutions about how the company is using TM Forum Open APIs to enable its API management and digital marketplace product and helping it to substantially ease integration for its customers.
Karthik T S, Head – Centre of Excellence, Torry Harris Integration Solutions
Tell us about yourself and your job
I head the Centre of Excellence and Products team at Torry Harris Integration Solutions. Over the last 20 years, I have worked with enterprises to build their IT integration backbones, helping them succeed in their digital initiatives. Specifically, with communications service providers (CSPs), I help establish API-driven connectivity of their assets internally and externally for building robust digital ecosystems. I work on productizing solutions to accelerate enterprise digital initiatives. DigitMarket™ is an API management and digital marketplace product that fast-tracks the creation of enterprise digital ecosystems. I have also co-authored the book – “Digital API Economy - Beneficiaries, Enablers and Catalysts.”
Why do you believe in TM Forum’s Open API program?
The TM Forum Open API program aligns well with our approach of helping enterprises extend the power of digital access through the adoption and use of API-driven opportunities. Open APIs facilitate standardization across group companies and help us add value to our customers by fostering interoperability across different industry players.
What TM Forum Open APIs are most valuable to your company?
The following TM Forum Open APIs are most valuable to us:
Product & Service Catalog Management API
Product & Service Inventory Management API
Appointment API
Customer Bill Management
Federated Identity Management
Partnership Type Management
Payment Methods API
Why did you choose to highlight those APIs?
These APIs align perfectly with DigitMarket product’s core features. We decided not to re-invent the wheel and instead use the TM Forum Open APIs for the product’s sub-systems that required integration touchpoints. Our product engineering team conducted a fitment analysis at an early stage and found a close match to TM Forum Open APIs. Choosing a well-adopted API standard in the telco business support systems (BSS) landscape greatly increases the ease of integration for our customers.
How do you use the APIs?
We use TM Forum APIs to expose API interfaces on our marketplace product DigitMarket, to enable frictionless integration internally and with third parties. DigitMarket follows an API-first strategy for both northbound and southbound integration. It provides an out-of-the-box, intuitive user interface for the storefront, vendor portal and the admin portal. But we recommend deploying it in a headless mode to our customers. It makes it easier for our CSP customers to extend their customer portals and mobile apps by building tailor-made marketplace screens, leveraging DigitMarket APIs. Southbound integration through Open APIs makes it easier to integrate with TM Forum compliant BSS applications such as billing, order management, payment, product catalogue, etc.
How have you benefited from using these APIs?
TM Forum Open APIs align closely with our product's design goals such as mandating an “API-first” strategy, low-cost integration, headless deployment mode and BSS interoperability. For BSS systems supporting TM Forum APIs, DigitMarket allows plug-and-play integration. It reduces costs and time to market for our customers. When CSPs have legacy BSS systems that are not TM Forum compliant, we provide an add-on tool called “Coupler” that includes data transformation rules to remap legacy interfaces to TM Forum Open APIs easily.
Where do you use them?
The DigitMarket suite of products, including the digital marketplace and API management products, use TM Forum Open APIs across Europe, Middle-East and India. The product suite supports and accelerates digital initiatives for CSPs, insurance companies, fintechs, edtech platforms and home services.
Have you used them in conjunction with any other APIs?
We have used TM Forum Open APIs in conjunction with open banking APIs to support the requirements of financial services industry.
