My API Story: Standardizing integration

Lejla Pljevljak-Rašidagić, Chief Product Officer (CPO), ZIRA, explains how aligning Zira’s product integration principles with TM Forum’s Open API program enables it to rapidly integrate new services into digital ecosystems.

Tell us about yourself and your company

I am responsible for the company’s product strategy and product development direction, promoting product excellence at the same time. Over my 20 years with ZIRA, I have been responsible for product management, product design, and product marketing. I play an active role in product innovation and maintain overall responsibility for developing internal systems that are helping scale up product development. ZIRA provides fully digitalized BSS software solutions to 50+ telecom operators across 30+ countries. Award-winning solutions from ZIRA product portfolio provide digital service providers (DSPs) with customer/partner relationship management, order management, revenue management and product catalog solutions.

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

The following API’s are most valuable for ZIRA:

• TMF620 – Product Catalog Management
• TMF622 – Product Ordering
• TMF633 – Service Catalog Management
• TMF637 – Product Inventory Management
• TMF638 – Service Inventory Management
• TMF641 – Service Ordering Management
• TMF679 – Product Offering Qualification Management
• TMF666 – Account Management
• TMF663 – Shopping Cart

ZIRA is committed to certifying other APIs that are in alignment with our product strategy.

Why did you choose to highlight those APIs?

Aligning our integration principles with Open API standardization was one of our top priorities while designing our products, along with their core functionalities. Providing ZIRA products to our customers with a standardized way of integration is our vision. With this same vision we have opted for a set of APIs and keep on enlarging the list of certified APIs.

How do you use the APIs?

Key platform capabilities need to be leveraged through APIs for internal and external usage to maintain uniformity in business value delivered through platform or integration. We are developing and consuming APIs based on the same principle. Our customers are using these APIs to streamline the quote and ordering process with us, to access the product catalog in a standard way.

How have you benefited from using those APIs?

TM Forum Open APIs contributed to our product and solutions to become more attractive to our customers. One of the key challenges in digital transformation projects is complexity in integrating various platforms. With Open API, the integration between ZIRA and other platforms becomes simpler and faster, enabling our customers to focus on other business challenges.

Open APIs allow us to implement a standard way to interact with other systems without making any changes within data model and core features. Internally, a lot of time is saved for API design as this is already provided by the Open API.

Where do you use them?

These APIs are used within ZIRA BSS product portfolio (Order Management, Product Catalog, Wholesale Solution etc). Our customers in Europe and the Middle East get those APIs within implementation of ZIRA products. Our target is that all internal and external exposed APIs are aligned to Open APIs.

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

ZIRA product strategy is focused on product innovation and constant improvement of ZIRA product portfolio to support our customers in their digital business transformations. Open APIs allow different vendors to implement a standard way to interact with other systems, which enables faster integration of different solutions in a DSP’s digital ecosystem.

We believe that continuous investment in our products is key factor to our success. Therefore, alignment of our product integration principles with TM Forum’s Open API program will remain one of our top priorities.