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Communications service providers are using Open APIs to simplify IT environments and move applications to the cloud, but many also plan to use the interfaces to expose their IT systems to external partners in platform business models. This excerpt from our research report on Open APIs looks at the pace of adoption.
Dawn Bushaus
The status of Open API adoption
Adoption of the TM Forum Open APIs has been increasing steadily since the first three REST-based interfaces were introduced in 2013 and the Open API Program was officially launched in 2016. Most communications service providers (CSPs) are using them to simplify IT environments and move applications to the cloud, but many also plan to use the interfaces to expose their IT systems to external partners in platform business models. This excerpt from our research report on Open APIs looks at the pace of adoption. Late in 2020, we conducted a survey of CSPs and their suppliers to ask about their use of Open APIs. Most of the companies that responded are adopting the Open APIs, and this is not surprising given that many are active TM Forum members. Only about a quarter of respondents said their companies are not adopting the Open APIs, but most of them plan to do so.
Encouragingly, more than 93% of CSP respondents said Open API adoption is part of a broader corporate strategy. A transformation strategy that insists on use of the Open APIs throughout the business and across operating companies is key to widespread adoption and making Open APIs the de facto standard. However, a few respondents said they are having difficulty getting buy-in company-wide. “Within the OSS department we have a strategy to focus on Open APIs, but in the whole company there is a lack of willingness to do so,” writes one respondent from a small European CSP. A respondent from a large global operator gave a similar assessment. Some people also noted that in practice it simply is difficult to get all operating companies and departments to adopt common technology including Open APIs, even when it is corporate strategy. At one large European CSP, for example, the architects of a new 5G developer portal have not yet incorporated the Open APIs because they didn’t know about them.
The graphic below compares CSP and supplier adoption of specific types of Open APIs. For the purposes of the survey, we grouped them logically as outlined below. These groupings are the same as those used in the Forum’s ongoing Open API Adoption Assessments:
It is not at all surprising that customer and product APIs are among the most widely adopted Open APIs as most CSPs begin digital transformation with customer-facing systems, which are critical to running the business. We were a bit surprised at the popularity of the resource and service APIs because most CSPs are just beginning to experiment with approaches such as network-as-a-service. But resource APIs are also used for physical inventory like handsets, which likely explains the high rate of adoption.
An easy explanation for different rates of adoption among CSPs and suppliers is that all companies want to protect their own approaches and investments. But it is more complicated than that. Large, incumbent suppliers have relied on locking in their CSP customers, but this is not necessarily nefarious. Vendors need to protect their investments in research and development. And while CSPs say they want to avoid vendor lock-in, they don’t want to do so at the cost of jeopardizing innovation. In the middle are startups and niche software suppliers that take one of two positions: go all in on Open APIs and other standards to prove their value in the ecosystem; or stand behind their product’s unique capabilities and homegrown APIs and wait for direction from CSP customers on when and how to change. Each position is valid – or has been – until now. But so many disruptive changes are now underway, such as the seismic shift in the competitive landscape underpinned by hyperscale cloud providers, growing network and application expertise within enterprises themselves, 5G deployment, virtualization, automation, and the need to manage exponentially larger volumes of data. Meeting these challenges requires collaboration as an industry on common pieces of the puzzle.
While 65% of CSP respondents said their requests for information and proposal (RFIs and RFPs) require support for Open APIs, supplier respondents reported even higher demand. We asked for a simple yes or no from CSPs, but we asked the question bit differently of suppliers as shown in the graphic below.
Many suppliers report that it is rare to receive an RFP that does not request support for Open APIs, and we believe these requests are persuading more vendors to increase support for Open APIs in their products and services. CSPs would like for the commitment to be stronger, however, with only 7% saying that their suppliers are very committed to Open APIs and nearly 43% believing vendors are mostly paying lip service to Open APIs.
But vendors say there is a difference between requesting support and making it mandatory, and some suppliers wish all CSPs would make Open API compliance mandatory in all RFPs. Full compliance would make integration easier for everyone and would drive the Open APIs as the de facto standard. For example, although software supplier Matrixx is planning to adopt Open APIs, the company sees little incentive for incorporating them. While some CSPs are asking for support for two Open APIs that Matrixx could use in its solutions (the Usage Management API and Prepay Balance Management API), the company says operators have not made them mandatory.
Suppliers who do comply with Open APIs see it as a competitive advantage. Says Mounir Ladki, President and CTO of MYCOM-OSI: “We would like them to be requested more and even made mandatory. Integration projects are overly complex, risky, time-consuming and costly. Open APIs are really an answer to reducing the risk and cost and time to market. They increase the chance of success for these projects.” Vance Shipley, Founder and CEO of SigScale, agrees. “You can’t expect the big vendors to wake up tomorrow and decide to be altruistic,” he says. “But when the group of operators who can afford to flex their position start to really drive requirements, the vendors will have to come on board.” Indeed, this is already happening as large CSPs such as Vodafone and Orange are making Open APIs mandatory in their RFPs. Be sure to check out the other articles in this series, including a look at what’s driving Open API adoption and this companion piece which provides a creative explanation of the Open Digital Architecture from the perspective of Orange’s Laurent Leboucher, who compares today’s telco IT architecture to a Jackson Pollock painting. To find out more about the history of the Open APIs, check out the first installment in the series. In the next excerpt from the Open API report, we will look at how CSPs are using the Open APIs.
