My API story: Optimizing user interface and backend designs

Roy Kucukates, Senior Enterprise Architect, EPAM Systems explains how Open APIs help EPAM Systems' user experience designers to optimize user interface and backend designs and give engineers greater flexibility.

Tell us about yourself and your job

I am an enterprise architect and my education and experience has been focused on the telecommunications domain, with a complete end-to-end knowledge of telecom systems including network, operation support systems (OSS), business support systems (BSS), and telecom business models. As a digital business strategist my goal is to assist telecom companies to strategize, envision, design, create and manage their most critical initiatives. Allowing telecoms to adapt to the changing industry landscape and grow their strategies to transform their businesses into digitally managed, data & analytics driven, technology agnostic ecosystems.

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

EPAM believes in TM Forum Open APIs because they have generated value to our client projects since day one.

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

We have used the following APIs in our customer projects: Account management, communication, customer management, party interaction management, party management, party role management, payment management, payment methods, product catalog management, product inventory management, product offering qualification, product ordering, resource inventory management, shopping cart.

Why did you choose to highlight those APIs?

In all digital transformation projects, improving the customer’s experience is the key of the organization’s success. A frictionless interaction with the customer needs to be provided by an excellent user interface and API-first backend design. We believe the Open APIs we have selected are extremely important to support our user experience designers to come up with excellent designs and give our engineers enough flexibility to decouple the technical capabilities from the channel applications & systems.

How do you use those APIs?

Most digital transformation projects start with designing the customer’s journeys, including onboarding the customer with the best digital experience, capturing change orders require Catalog, Shopping Cart, Order, and Customer Management capabilities. Providing detailed information in a seamless way requires Customer, Inventory, Payment, Usage and Balance Management capabilities. We believe these capabilities are perfectly exposed using these Open APIs.

How have you benefited from using these APIs?

EPAM is helping clients on their digital transformation and modernization journeys. Our synthesis of business consulting, deep technology skills, and perpetual focus on the end user is a unique combination that allows EPAM to not only create the future but also make it real. EPAM’s experience in digital transformation has enabled our clients to deliver innovation to the market at a faster rate, with shorter production times which TM Forum Open APIs can enable. TM Forum Open APIs are enabling the project teams to abstract the OSS/BSS backend components from the channel applications and integrations with third party systems. The entity models and patterns provided as part of the API standards are helping the architecture and development teams to work in alignment and in harmony.

Where do you use the APIs?

In 2021 we have used these APIs in two communication service providers (one in North America, another one in Europe). We will continue to use them in all engagements where the APIs apply. We also used them as part of the Catalyst project, 5G next-gen performance with cloud gaming. EPAM increased the number of TM Forum certified professionals and we are committed as a company to continue to grow our team of TM Forum qualified individuals and continuously support the education of all EPAMers. Our engineers will be able to generate more value for our clients using an API-first approach and Open API standards. Discover more My API stories.