My API Story: Streamlining system integration and decoupling

Tell us about yourself and your job?

With 27+ years in telecom, I'm a tech enthusiast driving innovation. As CEO of Xacria, I leverage cutting-edge tech like streaming and NoSQL to drive strategic growth. Our flagship product, Xacria Network Orchestrator (XNO), transforms telco with unparallelled flexibility and scalability. XNO separates Network Service Provisioning from BSS, simplifying IT and enabling seamless integration with the latest technologies.

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

We value TM Forum's Open API program for its standardization, modularization and formalization. By decomposing services into resources, it offers significant decoupling benefits, allowing northbound BSS platforms to manage services independently of network configurations. Xacria leverages this approach to streamline operations, reducing costs and infrastructure maintenance for our customers.

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

TMF641 Service Ordering Management

TMF652 Resource Ordering Management

TMF638 Service Inventory Management

TMF639 Resource Inventory Management

TMF701 Process Flow Management

Why did you choose to highlight these APIs?

The Ordering Management APIs (TMF641/652) help decouple IT applications from the complexity of service provisioning across complex multi-domain, multi-vendor networks.

The Inventory Management APIs (TMF638/639) provide standardized access to the inventory databases managed by XNO, enabling flexible and standardized interfaces for order and inventory management.

The Inventory Management APIs (TMF638/639) provide standardized access to XNO's inventory databases, facilitating flexible order and inventory management interfaces.

How do you use these APIs?

The Ordering Management APIs (TMF641/652) are exposed northbound as open provisioning APIs by XNO. XNO handles the payload and events of these APIs as messages on a message broker, offering increased decoupling and scalability compared to REST APIs.

The Inventory Management APIs (TMF638/639) offer a standardized approach to access XNO's service and resource inventory databases. Additionally, leveraging the events defined in these APIs enables automated network reconciliation processes supported by XNO.

The Process Flow Management API (TMF701) events are integral to our distributed event-driven engine. In this engine, distributed tasks synchronize with each other through TMF701 events exchanged on a message broker such as Kafka.

How have you benefited from using these APIs?

TM Forum’s Open APIs, exposed northbound by Xacria Network Orchestrator (XNO), streamline system integration efforts and provide significant decoupling from the complexities of the networks managed by XNO. Overall, these APIs have influenced the design of our platform from its inception. This, combined with our microservices architecture, has enabled seamless integration with TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA).

Where do you use them?

XNO is primarily used in Italy by Tier 1, 2, and 3 operating companies.

Have you used them in conjunction with any other APIs?

We leverage the Ordering Management APIs (TMF641/652), often paired with legacy platforms and APIs. In various integration scenarios, we have found that implementing TM Forum Open APIs on Kafka ensures seamless and efficient integration, enhancing decoupling and scalability. Additionally, in certain cases, TM Forum's Ordering Management APIs have been integrated with NETCONF/RESTCONF APIs.