My API Story: From monolithic to modular and composable

Tell us about yourself and your job

As the VP of Product at Marand, my primary responsibility is to ensure that we develop the right products that effectively address the challenges faced by modern communications service providers (CSPs), while adhering to the best industry practices and standards.

In the past 20 years, I have architected and delivered several business support systems (BSS) and digital transformation projects. These projects encompassed diverse, multi-vendor environments and involved open standards integration. I was also among the contributors to TM Forum’s shared information and data model (SID).

Currently, I am actively engaged in the development of Open APIs, working towards advancing the interoperability of telecom BSS systems.

Why do you believe in TM Forum’s Open API program?

The Open API program has been instrumental in transforming our product portfolio, allowing us to introduce a range of lightweight, cloud-native, and modular products built upon TM Forum's Open Digital Architecture (ODA). In contrast to our previous monolithic offering for CSPs, our new portfolio implements a composable architecture, enabling us to precisely address customers’ unique requirements, business challenges, and IT environment.

Open APIs represent a much-needed standardization in interoperability of heterogenous systems that significantly accelerates implementation and reduces complexity.

What TM Forum Open APIs are most valuable to your company?

The set of core commerce APIs, especially pre-ordering and ordering APIs:

TMF620 - Product Catalog Management

TMF622 - Product Ordering

TMF648 - Quote Management

TMF679 – Product Offering Qualification

Why did you choose to highlight those APIs?

Marand offers a modular and composable core commerce system based on TM Forum’s ODA. A product catalog is a cornerstone of our catalog-driven quoting and ordering platform, the Omni CPQ. A product catalog is also instrumental when building partner ecosystems. (Pre)ordering APIs accelerate digital transformation by serving various digital engagement channels without introducing unnecessary complexity due to redundancy and functional overlapping, enabling zero-touch integration.

How do you use those APIs?

Each of our products exposes a standard Open API. We use Open APIs, both internally and externally, for communication among components comprising our product and to integrate with products supplied by other vendors. Open APIs are our preferred integration whenever customers opt for a multi-vendor, best-of-breed approach. For example, we use Open APIs to expose the product catalog to our quoting and ordering platform, Omni CPQ. Omni CPQ uses Open APIs to extend a horizontal ‘software as a service’ customer relationship management (SaaS CRM) with a telecommunications industry cloud capability. We use Open APIs to integrate with a convergent charging system and to wrap in-house legacy applications. Essentially, whenever Marand can collaborate with other vendors and internal IT to deliver the optimal solution for our customers, we prioritize the utilization of Open APIs.

How have you benefited from using those APIs?

Open APIs helped us to reduce complexity and streamline system architecture. Encapsulating all data and functions in smaller, loosely coupled components enables us to reuse functionality and avoid unnecessary overlapping and redundancy. The outcomes are shorter implementation times and reduced implementation and integration costs. Benefits for our customers include improved agility, shorter time to market for new products and services, improved operational efficiency, and improved data consistency and quality.

Where do you use them?

Telekom Slovenije is one of our most forward-looking customers. TM Forum’s ODA served as an architectural blueprint when designing their BSS transformation. Marand supplied core commerce components that integrate with components supplied by SAP and Microsoft.

We successfully used TM Forum standards on projects solving specific business problems (e.g. product catalog) in Central and Southeastern Europe as well.

Have you used them in conjunction with any other APIs?

In certain scenarios, we use Open APIs to wrap legacy systems and expose their data and functionality in a standardized manner. New cloud-native components access legacy via Open APIs. Integration remains unaffected when gradually decommissioning legacy, which significantly reduces risk. We used this approach to consolidate legacy product inventories through TMF637 and party/customer management through TMF629, TMF632, and TMF669.

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