We talk to Sreeraj Sivadasan, OSS Transformation Software Engineering Manager, BT about the crucial TM Forum Open APIs used to get all of BT's OSS inventory in the same place , and the "dream" agile benefits they enabled.
Tell us about yourself and your job I am part of the OSS Transformation team in BT Wholesale Line of Business and am responsible for building the next generation OSS tools which will help network teams drive automation, analytics, agility, and, above all, integrity in service delivery and assurance across physical, virtual, and hybrid network configurations. My colleagues and I work with different teams to help them solve their issues and make our systems more dynamic and agile.
Why do you believe in TM Forum’s Open API program?By using TM Forum Information Framework (SID) and Open APIs we were able to quickly scale up our model and data access strategies, without investing huge time and effort in developing from scratch.
This has proven to be a win-win situation for us and our networks team, with new deliveries from our project every two weeks, which would have been a dream in the legacy world.
What TM Forum Open APIs are most valuable to your team? Since the current focus has been to build a single inventory store, the following inventory specific APIs are valuable:
- Resource Inventory Management API
- Service Inventory Management API
Why did you choose to highlight these APIs?Our Single Resource Inventory Management Systems (WS SRIMS) model transformation program was born mainly to get all OSS inventory into a single place and this would effectively mean a clean OSS inventory information which can be used for intelligent network automation helping drive automation, analytics, agility, and, above all, integrity in service delivery and assurance across physical, virtual, and hybrid network configurations.
In terms of inventory, we mainly store our network resources (physical and logical) and services (RFS mainly), which are provisioned using these network resources.
The Resource Inventory Management API and Service Inventory management API - get, post, delete, notifications etc. - are key to make our SRIMS Inventory store a success story.
How do you use these APIs?We use physical resources to store all physical entities stored in our network exchanges like structure, rack, equipment, cards, ports along with logical resources to store logical entities like a device interface, circuit, bearer, VPN, IP Address, VLAN tags etc.
Similarly, we use service entities like Service and ServiceConfiguration to store our resource facing services and relate them with underlying logical and physical resources to deliver those services. We use the GET, POST, PATCH, DELETE API’s to read, write/update and delete these resources and services.
Where do you use them?WS SRIMS application is used to store OSS inventory for network resources across the UK, hence the system is used by planning, provisioning and operational teams across the country.
How have you benefited from using these APIs?By having a standard based generic API mechanism, it has helped us integrate with other OSS/BSS interfaces, user interfaces along with even 3d visualizations with the same set of data APIs without changing the backend data integration API and reusing it for all functions and the addition of only business logic in the upper layer.
This means we are more agile in our deliveries and it has therefore led to speeding up our time-to-market for any new product/network introduction/changes. Additionally, the cost for data discrepancies and maintenance has reduced by having a common gateway to OSS inventory data.
To learn more about TM Forum Open APIs visit www.tmforum.org/open-apis 
