My API Story: Reducing integration costs

Tell us about yourself and your job

Since 1997, in over seven different telecom operators around the world, I’ve been leading Digital and BSS / OSS transformation programs. Transformation programs are highly complex and sensitive given the non-standard legacy architectures, systems and interfaces. Enacting change in these environments can be a costly and time-consuming challenge to bring business value in a timely way. In my role of leading IT strategy and architecture, I strive to achieve cost effective modern designs that deliver business value and flexibility for the ever-changing requirements.

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

We believe in open standards to enable a more plug and play environment which reduces time to market and the cost of integrations. With a common set of “integration language” it makes it easier for the teams to communicate on integration approach. We encourage our partners or future partners to support these open standards to further reduce integration costs.

What TM Forum Open APIs are most valuable to your company?
The most important TM Forum APIs for Liberty Latin America (LLA) are TMF666, TMF629 and TMF622.

Why did you choose to highlight those APIs?

While nearly all the TMF Open APIs are important to us and we utilize more than the three I listed, these are the most useful in enabling us to sign up customers and sell services in various channels. We will be able to provide these standards-based APIs to partners such as MVNOs. This enables a faster time-to-market and reduced cost of implementation of integration.

How do you use those APIs?

We are abstracting our experience layer from our substantial set of legacy platforms through middleware based on TMF Open APIs. This has provided a standards-based API set to enable our Digital and CRM platforms to have a reusable set of defined APIs for faster deployment.

How have you benefited from using those APIs?

We have benefited from the reuse of APIs between supporting Digital Sales and Care functional areas. They will enable our ability to open up to third parties such as MVNOs and OTTs. It has provided us with a jump start by working with a documented and known set of APIs where we can collaborate with our vendors and partners. It has reduced the time for integration because we spend less time on design, development and testing.

Where do you use them?

Liberty Latin America operates in 20+ markets with 25+ BSS systems that are integrated with our API middleware. We continue to roll out the TMF APIs across our ecosystem. Our new IT BSS/OSS stack is based on TMF APIs. This enables significant reuse of our Digital and CRM development efforts to integrate with the new IT stack.

Have you used them in conjunction with any other APIs?

We have a long history of utilizing middleware starting with our own bespoke APIs. As TMF’s Open APIs matured we started to evolve our middleware architecture from bespoke to standards based. Many of our legacy systems have custom APIs which we are normalizing with the TMF API based middleware to modern applications that are standardizing on TMF Open APIs.

To learn more about Liberty Latin America visit: lla.com