Real World Implementation of TM Forum Open APIs

TM Forum’s suite of Open APIs offers a standard and language-agnostic interface for describing RESTful APIs. The use of these open APIs is becoming increasingly popular as a means of promoting interoperability between different systems and platforms. The more collaborative and unified industry best practices are, the better it is for actual practitioners.

With more than 140 of the worlds’ leading CSPs and technology partners signing the Open API Manifesto, TM Forum Open APIs have continued to play a very important role in becoming the de facto standard for Telcos as part of their Digital Transformation strategies. This clearly demonstrates the outcome of the collaboration among TM Forum members community across different domains and businesses who have deliberated to arrive at standardized specifications that all stakeholders and partners must leverage.

To differentiate themselves and deliver new customer-centric services, Communications Service Providers (CSPs) are distinguishing themselves by becoming Digital Service Providers (DSPs) with a more software-centric, telco to techco, and digital approach. To support this transition, technology partners are moving from their current legacy, non-standardized protocol frameworks to a more cloud-based platform ecosystem.

TM Forum certified vendor Open API conformance for commercial software products is a step towards standardization as these legacy systems were designed over years of custom development, which has led to huge technical debt and costly integration/upgrade processes. It signifies the intent of various vendors to work in a more open interoperable environment. However, there is still doubt among CSPs, if every version of the vendor’s product is conformant (specifically where there are different code branches per customer), or if the Open APIs will be used when they deploy the product in a real-world environment.

Hence one of the initiatives from TM Forum to start certifying vendors with their real-world open API implementations has provided greater visibility on actual production-level APIs. These APIs are jointly brought in for certification by the CSP and the Technology partner and hence provides a greater amount of transparency in the capability demonstration.

The objectives of this initiative are to:

• Encourage the use of open APIs in the telecom industry
• Encourage the development of open API standards
• Encourage the implementation of open API standards
• Provide seamless interoperability across different technology partners
• Use a common language for communicating with different systems

The TM Forum Open APIs are developed jointly by industry experts converging together in a collaborative TM Forum project approach and coming out with a real-world usability perspective of an API. When more members carry out their implementation of these APIs, the more real-world significance it attains.

Some of the benefits of having real-world open APIs are as follows:

• Collaboration from various partners within the Telco industry to other industry players across e-commerce, healthcare, banking, and fintech sectors, etc.
• Significantly reduces the time for these application developers to integrate their applications within the CSP ecosystem.
• The quicker the integration, the faster the time to market for various functionalities and features.
• Simplifies the understanding and integration among various applications.
• Significantly improve the customer experience in cross-domain bundling of products overall increasing customer satisfaction.
• Significantly reducing the operational overheads by having a standardized and common integration interface for interoperability.
• The acceleration toward Digital Maturity

With the advent of 5G and Acceleration in Transformation strategies, the telecom industry is going through a massive overhaul of its ecosystem to drive towards a digital ecosystem for customer experience and monetization. Technology providers are redefining the approach towards this digital transformation path by opening-up of BSS assets using Digital Business Ecosystem to leverage new business models. We believe that Open APIs with dynamic connectivity capabilities will help in enabling new partnerships for DSPs to onboard innovative services for their retail and enterprise customers. Ecosystem players must communicate with each other through standard API specifications to drive growth forward. The digital service providers hence look for independent software vendors/developers who adopt this API standardization and drive monetization through increased service usage seamlessly.

With the flexibility and ease of use of TM Forum’s Open APIs across different business models and with the adoption from industries such as IoT, we understand that TM Forums Open APIs are the future of enterprise architecture for orchestrating innovative use cases that will continue to empower digitally connected communities.

We at Tecnotree, believe that Open APIs are of utmost value to our products and customers, and it has helped us to capture as well as provide business critical user-journeys in the areas of Lead-to-Quote, Quote-to-Order, and Order-to-Cash processes in line with the TM Forum SID data models in a simplified manner for our Digital Products Portfolio. We are not only using these APIs to enable CSPs to focus on core telco service capabilities but also fight disruption by enabling new micro to macro ecosystems and business cases by leveraging the TM Forums ODA guidelines.

TM Forum Open APIs also present an excellent platform to design microservices. Bundling microservices with cloud-native technologies, present the ability to rapidly compose solutions curtailed to the needs of the business. In addition, we are also able to scale up the Enterprise Solution Framework to various market segments (Retail, VNE/VNO, Corporate & Enterprise) and the fulfillment of different business models related to B2C, B2B, and B2B2X for our customers and their partner ecosystem.

We are the first Technology partner to have successfully been certified for the Real-world open API Implementation along with the CSP.