Rapid growth in Open API certification as more telcos push for compliance

During 2021, TM Forum saw the most rapid increase to date in the number of companies certifying Open APIs, with more than 30 organizations certifying in excess of 240. In addition, more than 100 of the world’s leading communications service providers (CSPs) and technology suppliers have signed the TM Forum Open API Manifesto. Now Reliance Jio has become the first CSP to achieve TM Forum Open API Platinum conformance certification, reflecting a growing trend towards using Open APIs to help create open ecosystems. Speakers at Telecom TV’s The Great Telco Debate: Open Telco Infra highlighted some of the reasons why CSPs and their suppliers are adopting APIs, including the development of more horizontal, software-driven systems that support new business models and partnerships.

“The move to software, that lower layers can be controlled by higher level layers in a simple…unified way in order to allow economies of scale…that's all about open APIs,” said Franz Seiser, Vice President Access Disaggregation, Deutsche Telekom, during the debate. “The whole way…services are provided – how we integrate, how we collaborate with partners, how we make our services controllable, the finer granular level to get the solution – is open APIs and making things accessible.”

An increasing number of CSPs are making TM Forum Open API conformance part of their preferred requirement when purchasing new IT systems. In total five suppliers - Comviva, Inspur, Tecnotree, Totogi and Whale Cloud - have achieved TM Forum’s platinum level of Open API conformance, which means they have certified more than 20 APIs. They are now joined by Reliance Jio, which is the first CSP to attain Open API platinum conformance with TM Forum.

Jio believes they offer CSPs the standardization and interoperability that makes product launches faster, more streamlined and future-proof, according to Aayush Bhatnagar, Senior Vice President, Jio.

The Indian telco is using Open APIs to help build an agile development environment for 5G services.

“5G is all about use cases being packaged as products – and TM Forum’s Open APIs enable this architecture to be agile enough to enable new services,” says Bhatnagar.

Jio makes greatest use of product, service and resource catalog APIs, which help support integration in its business processes.

“By using the service and resource fulfilment APIs, we were able to integrate the end-to-end processes of combo 4G-5G provisioning and service activation and get it first time right,” says Bhatnagar. “This enables the on-boarding of not only consumer products for retail customers, but also products for enterprise 5G, which leverage network slicing.”

And because Jio is using products with an in-built API engine that is highly configurable, “adoption of TM Forum Open APIs is a seamless exercise,” he adds.

Increased demand from CSPs

Tecnotree has seen a marked uptick in demand from CSPs for Open API conformance. “When we started off with this, there was no customer asking for it,” says Suddhasatwa Sengupta, Principal Consultant, Tecnotree. But “in terms of percentage, I can say at least 20% to 30% of opportunities & RFPs now specifically mention conformance to Open APIs, and some even go to the extent of needing the certification.”

Oracle, which has achieved gold API conformance, goes further: API conformance requirements are “in almost all RFPs these days. It’s becoming table stakes in the service provider community,” according to Jean Lawrence, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Oracle Communications.

“Many of the Tier 1 CSPs, with whom we collaborate on catalysts and commercial engagements, have very active Open API programs and are embracing their implementation, in some cases wrapping and exposing pre-existing API as Open APIs,” explains Lawrence. “Smaller or less mature CSPs expect to implement them directly as they adopt vendor products that already have built-in Open APIs.”

And Andreas Polz, SVP Technology, Innovation & Standards, Beyond by Bearing Point, which also has gold API conformance, states that the majority of RFPs from CSPs include questions about Open API conformance.

Meanwhile Tecnotree, which is involved in partnership-based ecosystems, expects to see an increase in the demand for Open APIs conformance. “We shall see a lot of digital services being sold by operators in partnership with digital services providers and OTT players, and we are not talking about just telco products, but also education, insurance, healthcare, sports & entertainment," says Sengupta. "How we get these different types of products & services that are bundled in a common catalog for both technical and commercials exposed as a seamless API to all platforms for easy consumption is going to define how successful the whole integrated ecosystem will become.”

Telco software systems will need to transform to be able to handle multiple new services by taking an approach of phased migration towards the ODA architecture, according to Sengupta. “Telcos want application providers to clearly articulate how layered and phased transformation could happen and that is very important because that's the whole dynamic in the era of digital transformation. In addition, with the advent of 5G – slicing of services, the partnership ecosystem, etc. has opened up the collaboration of various adjacent verticals and this could further change the market dynamics in terms of more acceptance of Open APIs.”

Beyond by Bearing Point also emphasizes the importance of supporting ecosystem orchestration. “Providing an Open API enabled ready-made platform means third parties are onboarded in record time of 6 weeks vs 1 year,” says Polz. “This has then led to reduced risk and budget/investment dependency by 75% in service partnering projects.”

WhaleCloud is another platinum-certified supplier that is seeing a increase in demand for Open APIs as telcos adapt their business models. “The usefulness of Open APIs will increasingly extend beyond OSS/BSS as telecom operators become digital service providers,” says Cece Li, Product Operation Director, Whalecloud.

Reducing costs

In addition to creating more agile systems that are easier to use, CSPs are interested in reducing costs, particularly when they have operations across multiple geographies.

“Our customers [with multinational operations] have this requirement for integration. Because they have multiple vendors [and]…projects across different countries, they want to unify this interface layer to decrease…expenditure [on] integration,” explains Whalecloud’s Li. “Nowadays more and more customers…require all the vendors to follow the same language and the same technical standards…in the API layer,” adds Li.

Open API usage significantly improves time-to-market for multi-geography implementations, says Polz. “The sales-cycle for major client targets has reduced by 50% in the last 18 months. This has been helped by the reduced implementation time (by 10-20%) in complex multi-country, multi-unit project rollouts for clients.”

Comviva also stresses the important role APIs play in simplifying the roll out of new services.

“In today’s connected world, data is exchanged between devices, systems and platforms, and APIs come with the means to exchange data,” says Vivek Verma, Senior Director Technical at Comviva. “There is going to be an upward trend of adoption of standard APIs. With the challenge of reducing the go to market [barriers] for services it’s very important to have a standard set of APIs so a platform can focus on innovation rather than the exchange of information.”

Open APIs also make it faster for vendors to develop and deploy products and services. “A lot of time is saved in R&D and API design as the Open API definition is already present,” says Comviva’s Verma.

Cloud solutions provider Inspur has also found that using Open APIs speeds up processes. “Before it took us a lot more time to do projects,” says Jonathan Zheng, VP, Overseas Dept., Inspur Communication Information Systems Co., Ltd.

Telecom software company Totogi, which aims to support all of TM Forum’s Open APIs, having already certified 31, believes: “The future of software in telco will be API-led; API-first. It is the future of any modern stack,” says Danielle Royston, Acting CEO of Totogi and CEO and Founder of TelcoDR. Totogi’s strategy is to design systems for the public cloud. “The key insight for telcos should be that not only are the systems of the future designed API-first, they also need to be designed with the public cloud,” says Royston.