My API story: Helping CSPs capture new digital service opportunities

Andreas Polz, SVP Technology, Innovation & Standards at Beyond by BearingPoint discusses how BearingPoint uses TM Forum's Open APIs to deliver OSS/BSS solutions that enable its telco customers to successfully onboard and orchestrate multiple services and devices from a range of partners, all while accelerating its own time to market.
Tell us about yourself and your job

As Chief Evangelist for Beyond, I draw on decades of telecom industry knowledge (personally and in our teams) to advise and support telecom projects for clients on a broad spectrum of subjects, ranging from industry standards and BSS solutions to innovation and creativity. I’m very proud to be a Distinguished Fellow in the TM Forum thanks many years of contributing to the Core Standards practice where I’m mostly active in ODA serving as Co-Lead of the Open API program and working on Open Digital Ecosystem Enablement (ODE).

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

Beyond by BearingPoint has always been a strong advocate for the importance of Open APIs as well as one of the first vendors to sign the TM Forum Open API Manifesto, and I’m proud to have been one of the driving forces behind the Open API program. We have since contributed to the specification of many now published Open APIs and encouraged uptake of the TM Forum Open API standards beyond the telecom sector with our customers in banking, insurance, retail, automotive, transport and the public sector.

Open APIs are an essential IT Architecture element when designing technology solutions such as BSS and OSS. Beneficial for system integration, as well as product innovation as Open APIs based on customer, catalogue, order and billing enable partnering and bundling which results in companywide and vertical monetization. Open APIs also increase longevity of investment and return on investment as they allow for future additions and integrations based on their standard interfaces on an existing platform.

What TM Forum Open API is most valuable to your company?

The most valuable API for our customers is definitely the Service Ordering API (TMF641). This API is at the core of every OSS/BSS project, so it is an essential cog in our Infonova platform which acts as is a solid foundation for CSPs who wish to capture new digital services opportunities, or to modernize their BSS/OSS environment and grow revenue fast.

Why did you choose to highlight this API?

First conceived as a multi-party BSS platform back in 2007, Infonova platform (DBP) is now a fully cloud native Type 2 Digital Marketplace solution where all the UI functionality is also available in APIs. Infonova DBP enables organizations to operate simultaneously as independent “digital” businesses or within a partner ecosystem. An organization’s shopping cart might include components from hundreds of partners that need to be bundled into solutions for telecoms customers or other verticals. Our platform automatically fulfills, activates and accurately monetizes this process for each organization across a secure supply chain of partners - and TMF641 is the core handoff API between BSS and OSS that enables this.

The Infonova APIs which enable the business ecosystem partners to trade without friction are absolutely key and valuable for the many customers that use them – often without realizing! So, in certifying 11 Infonova APIs to TM Forum standards, this only touches a small but very important set of Infonova Open APIs.

How do you use the Open APIs?

Many telcos need to deliver new services which are a combination of new devices and cloud-based offerings together with legacy services which need to be digitized and orchestrated, e.g., fixed line Ethernet services. To enable our customers to leverage the best interoperability, so that they can easily onboard and orchestrate the multiple services and devices often from multiple partners needed to deliver today’s solutions, we embedded the TM Forum API standards into Infonova right from the start of TM Forum’s API program.

We follow the design principles and standards created by the TM Forum’s Open API and Open Digital Architecture community to ensure that our Infonova platform is able to deliver the operating agility, cost base and customer experience required to successfully monetize 5G. This facilitates a truly ‘plug and play’ set of technology capabilities resulting in cost savings all round and an accelerated R&D process.

How have you benefited from using these APIs?

The benefits are tangible, mainly a noticeable acceleration in our R&D progress, especially in the areas of moving towards a microservices architecture significantly. In our solution presales phase, rapid prototyping for catalysts and POC implementations, agility of development has been enhanced by more than 50%. We have also managed to streamline our solution architecture to utilize the Open API approach to remove core code customizations by 100%. As a consequence, risk and effort in software version upgrades has been reduced from 6 months to 2 weeks.

For our customers, there’s been a significant improvement in time-to-market, in fact, the sales-cycle for major client targets has reduced by 50% in the last 18 months. This has been helped by the reduced implementation time (by 10-20%) in complex multi-country, multi-unit project rollouts for clients. And to support ecosystem orchestration, providing an Open API enabled ready-made platform means 3^rd parties are onboarded in record time (6 weeks vs 1 year).

This has then led to reduced risk and budget/investment dependency by 75% in service partnering projects. There has been a huge leap in test coverage by 30% through harmonizing the software testing harness used in the continuous integration approach with Open API standards. And lastly, we spend 15% less time answering RfX in the sales team where Open API compliance is part of a standard TM Forum RfX template used.

Where do you use the APIs?

We’re proud to say that 100% of Beyond by BearingPoint’s solution portfolio use TM Forum Open APIs, in fact, as many as 17 Open APIs have been implemented so far and counting. These solutions have been rolled out for multiple clients globally.

Have you used them in conjunction with any other APIs?

The Service Ordering API plays very well with the Product Catalog and Product Order APIs. By investing in these Open APIs, we’ve noticed that innovation in business models has driven a move towards a value-fabric oriented economy with partners, pro-sumers and co-competitors working for shared profit in a combined ecosystem.

Read more stories from the "My API Story" library