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My API story: Service Assurance

Yuval Stein, AVP Technologies, TEOCO, talks to TM Forum about how TM Forum Open APIs are helping the company's core business meet customer requirements, particularly in reducing the complexity of their OSS systems.

Ailis Claassen
04 Jul 2019
My API story: Service Assurance

My API story: Service Assurance

Yuval Stein, AVP Technologies, TEOCO
Yuval Stein, AVP Technologies, TEOCO, talks to TM Forum about how TM Forum Open APIs are helping the company's core business meet customer requirements, particularly in reducing the complexity of their OSS systems.

Tell us about yourself and your job

Throughout 15 years of experience in the service assurance domain, I have held key technology & product management positions. I use deep knowledge in fault, performance and service management to adapt service assurance solutions to the current industry challenges such as digital transformation and new network technologies. In recent years I have played an active role in various TM Forum standardization activities related to service assurance, including NFV standardization and several Catalyst projects.

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

The most valuable APIs for our company are: Alarm Management, Performance Monitoring and Performance Thresholding.

Why did you choose to highlight those APIs?

These APIs are related to our core business and we find that they answer the requirements of our customers in these areas.

How do you use those APIs?

These APIs are offered to our Service Assurance customers.

The advantage of these TM Forum APIs is the fact that they are not restricting touch points for these APIs. First, this means that the APIs can be used for both Northbound and Southbound OSS purposes. Additionally, in cases where TEOCO’s Helix Service Assurance solution provides KPIs, service alarms or resource alarms to external systems, these can be consumers of different kinds, such as BSS systems, inventory systems, other operational systems and even systems that are not necessarily within the traditional telecommunication domain. This way of using the same API between different systems makes these APIs more re-useable and helps our customers to reduce the complexity of their OSS systems.

How have you benefited from using those APIs?

We hope to see more usage of these APIs by our customers, which will help to reduce costs both for us and for our customers by re-using standard APIs.

Additionally, as the telecommunication operational management systems are moving towards advanced automation, we see more requirements for various use cases of closed-loop automation. These are based on the usage of APIs such as these ones that the TM Forum defines.

Where do you use them?

The APIs are part of TEOCO’s Helix Service Assurance offering.

How has TEOCO contributed to TM Forum Open APIs?

TEOCO has been an active TM Forum member for 15 years (including as TTI before it was acquired by TEOCO in 2010).

During that time, we have taken an active role in contributing to the generation of TM Forum APIs, focusing on APIs related to our core business. After contributing to the generation of the Alarm Management API and the Performance Management APIs in 2017, we made them available to our customers as part of Helix 10.0, released on March 2018. We are planning to continue the alignment with future versions of these APIs and to implement additional TM Forum APIs that are related to our suite of products.

To learn more about TM Forum Open APIs visit www.tmforum.org/open-apis