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My API Story: Product Catalog Management

We speak to Gil Steiner, Product Manager, Vlocity about the company's use of TM Forum's Product Catalog Management API and how it is helping them to turn a weeks’ worth of work into a days’ worth.

Ailis Claassen
15 May 2019
My API Story: Product Catalog Management

My API Story: Product Catalog Management

We speak to Gil Steiner, Product Manager, Vlocity about the company's use of TM Forum's Product Catalog Management API and how it is helping them to turn a weeks’ worth of work into a days’ worth.

Gil Steiner, Product Manager at Vlocity
Gil Steiner, Product Manager at Vlocity

Tell us about yourself and your job I am a product manager in Vlocity’s Communications, Media and Energy product group. My role focuses on product and solution integrations and covers, among many other areas, Vlocity’s support for TM Forum’s Open APIs. What TM Forum Open APIs are most valuable to your company? The APIs that are the most valuable to Vlocity are naturally APIs that touch the core areas of the Vlocity applications like CRM, CPQ, Product Catalog and Ordering. APIs such as Customer Management, Product Catalog, Product Ordering, Appointments, Trouble Ticketing and also ones that cover our interaction with other systems like Billing, Payment etc. are the ones that are the most valuable to us. I have chosen to focus here on Product Catalog Management (TMF 620) Why did you choose to highlight the Product Catalog Management API? Product Catalog is one of Vlocity’s core products and is often seen as a ‘hub’ for applications like CRM/CPQ/Ordering and other components of the ecosystem. I believe the ability to interact with a product catalog via standard APIs is very important and I see that need in the market. How do you use this API? We use this API to enable other applications to read (and possibly write into) our product catalog. This allows us to export products and offerings in a standard way and can support catalog alignment use cases with other systems as well. How have you benefited from using this API? Using this API accelerates catalog alignment. It provides a starting point that often needs some adjustment to customer specific Product Catalog implementations but with Vlocity’s unique declarative tools we use to implement these APIs, it can turn a weeks’ worth of work into a days’ worth of work in most cases. Where do you use this API? Many of our European customers use this API or have expressed the need to use it. Why do you believe in TM Forum’s Open API program? Open APIs allow vendors to implement a standard way to interact with other systems without the need to make fundamental changes in their data model or core features, even in cases where this data model is not SID (the Information Framework). I believe that this can support wide adoption of these APIs. Companies like Vlocity that have built their data model with SID in mind benefit even more when implementing Open APIs. To learn more about TM Forum Open APIs visit www.tmforum.org/open-apis