My API Story: Monetization in a 5G environment

Tell us about yourself and your job

I am a customer-centric leader with a particular focus on both customer and partner success. At Evergent, my primary responsibility is to scale our business through partnerships within our ecosystem.

I have more than two decades of software industry experience. My background in corporate partnerships and other roles has included driving strategy, governance, contract negotiation, and customer satisfaction leading to strong revenue generation. Most recently, I established and led a technology alliances group from the ground up into a thriving revenue generator for one of the world’s largest communications and information technology firms.

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

This program enhances the customer experience, speeds up integration with existing IT environments and lowers overall costs, basically everything a service provider seeks to check off in the search on how to improve, grow and scale! In addition, operators are always on the lookout for ways to monetize their network and infrastructure assets in a 5G environment. TM Forum’s Open API program helps unlock the value of these assets by speeding up integration between network and service APIs.

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

TMF620 - Product Catalog Management

TMF622 - Product Ordering Management

TMF629 - Customer Management

TMF676 - Payment Management

TMF678 - On Demand Integrated Billing

Why did you choose to highlight those APIs?

These APIs are critical to the success of our customer life cycle management and revenue monetization. As a SaaS (software as a service) platform, we use Open APIs to connect with the IT ecosystem of our customers. The service providers we partner with look to digital transformation in order to enhance the customer journey through customized experiences. These particular APIs address some of the most important interconnections in often complex digital transformation processes.

How do you use those APIs?

We use these APIs to integrate between our various SaaS platform offerings, which include the Evergent Monetization Platform, Revenue and Royalty Management and Captivate product suite, and individual service provider systems.

How have you benefited from using those APIs?

In very simple terms, these particular APIs make our customer integrations with the industry’s independent software vendors easier. By using TM Forum APIs, we are able to reduce the cost of integration, speed up our customer onboarding efforts and help to better manage and respond to customer churn. This is especially important because most customers today choose to opt for a multi-vendor, best of breed approach.

Where do you use them?

Evergent counts some of the top telcos and ‘over the top’ streaming/entertainment companies as its clients. These include two of the top 10 telecom entities, five of the top 10 entertainment services and five of the top 20 sports direct-to-customer providers across the globe. Our SaaS platform is being used to manage 700 million customer user accounts in over 180 countries worldwide.

While we have just begun our journey with TM Forum, we look forward to exposing these TM Forum-compliant APIs to all customers as we continue to explore and advance in this partnership as a member. Through these APIs, all our customers will be able to better integrate with their existing systems.

We are also involved in a Catalyst project this year called Billing Hub, which addresses ease of billing for service providers when bundling partner services.