TM Forum’s new API assessments aim to improve adoption of standard APIs

TM Forum has published pilot API adoption assessment reports for communications service providers (CSPs) and vendors to help them understand their progress in implementing TM Forum Open APIs relative to their peers. The results will help companies understand how to accelerate adoption of the standard APIs. Here we present the initial results and explain how we conducted the impartial, independent assessments. Find out how your company can participate in the next quarterly reports.

Standard application program interfaces (APIs) are critical for CSPs because they enable plug-and-play interoperability of components within their IT systems. APIs also allow operators to expose these capabilities to partners using platform-enabled business models.

Platform business models are revolutionary. They have changed not only how we buy, sell and exchange goods and services, but also how we communicate with each other and live our lives. Standard, publicly available APIs are at the heart of these business models, enabling modular, componentized systems to be assembled, disassembled and reassembled quickly and at low cost.

TM Forum members have collaborated to develop a suite of 50+ REST-based Open APIs to be used in a range of business scenarios – internally to enable service providers to transform IT systems and improve operational agility and customer centricity, and externally to deliver a practical approach to seamless, end-to-end management of complex digital services. These APIs are part of the TM Forum Open Digital Framework, which is an interactive, continuously evolving collection of tools, knowledge and standards that give CSPs an end-to-end migration path from legacy systems to modular, cloud-native IT components.

To date, 52 of the world’s leading communications service providers (CSPs) and technology suppliers have signed the Open API Manifesto, publicly demonstrating their endorsement of TM Forum Open APIs. The 17 CSP signatories have agreed to position the APIs as a preferred requirement in their IT requests for proposal, while 35 leading technology partners have committed to using the APIs in relevant product applications. These companies continue to provide feedback and extensions to the APIs, ensuring continuous growth of the community.

Introducing the CAAR and VAAR

About a year ago, CSPs began asking for a tool to help them compare vendors’ implementations of TM Forum Open APIs. They also wanted to know how their own deployments and use of the APIs stacks up against other CSPs'. The CSP API Adoption Assessment Report (CAAR) and Vendor API Adoption Assessment Report (VAAR) are the result.

The goal of these quarterly reports is to help companies conduct an independent and fair self-assessment of their usage of and compliance with TM Forum Open APIs in product portfolios and internal IT systems. The reports are based on the results of voluntary participation in quarterly VAAR and CAAR surveys which ask suppliers and CSPs questions about their use of Open APIs.

For the purposes of the survey, the APIs have been grouped logically as outlined below. This makes it easier for participants to answer only the questions that apply to their systems. For example, a vendor that delivers only billing software does not have to answer questions about network resource management APIs.

• Customer – APIs that CSPs use to interact with their customers (for example, customer management, shopping cart and bill management APIs)


• Engaged Party – APIs that CSPs use to interact with partners to deliver services (for example, privacy management, party interaction and partnership management APIs)


• Customer Engaged Party – APIs that are common to Customer and Engaged Party relationships (for example, product ordering, service level agreement management and payment management APIs)


• Product – APIs that CSPs use to manage the products they offer (for example, product catalog management and product inventory management)


• Resource – APIs that CSPs use to manage their physical resources (for example, resource catalog management, resource inventory management and alarm APIs)


• Service – APIs that CSPs use to manage their logical services (for example, service catalog management, service inventory management, and service activation and configuration APIs)


• Common – APIs that fit into all the groups described above (for example, trouble ticket, usage management, performance management and geographic location management APIs)


• Stand-alone – APIs that do not fit into any of the groups outlined above (for example, IoT device management and distributed ledger management APIs)

Assessing maturity and intent

The assessment tool evaluates maturity (x-axis) of Open API adoption, ranging from presence on a product roadmap to deployment in a CSP environment. It also evaluates the company’s intent (y-axis) or ambition to adopt the Open APIs. Based on these scores, the company is placed in one of four quadrants:

• Experimenting – respondent has completed some testing of Open APIs but has not fully incorporated them into products and services; they may have experimented with Open APIs in a sandbox environment, in TM Forum’s Open Digital Lab or as part of a TM Forum Catalyst proof of concept (low level of commitment and low level of maturity)


• Broad ambition – respondent has an ambitious commitment to support Open APIs across the whole scope of their products or systems but is early in the process of deploying them (high level of commitment but low level of maturity)


• Focused, targeted deployment – respondent has implemented a small number of Open APIs; maturity is advanced, but the number of APIs used only covers a small area of their product portfolio


• Widespread, mature deployment – respondent has implemented several Open APIs in a significant percentage of their product portfolio, and products are widely deployed in CSPs’ environments

Participants score maturity points for each ‘committed’ API, which is an API the respondent’s company already conforms with or has plans to conform with in the future. The largest number of points are awarded when a company has gone through certification testing, while fewer points are awarded for conformance with older versions of an API, and even fewer for APIs that are ‘in development’.

Using API conformance test kits (CTKs), which are available for most of the Open APIs, companies can self-assess conformance and report it to TM Forum. TM Forum also has begun formal certification of these APIs. If a company has participated in and passed certification testing, they are awarded the maximum number of points.

Participants score intent points for each ‘relevant’ API, which is an API that is applicable to their products or systems. Intent measures their ambition to implement the API. Again, the maximum number of points is awarded for conformant APIs deployed in production, while fewer points are awarded if the company has long-term plans to implement the API but has not done so.

Maturity and intent scores for each respondent are expressed as a percentage of the maximum possible score for all of that respondent’s relevant or committed APIs.

Pilot survey results

The pilot survey opened in March 2019 and collected responses from 12 suppliers and 7 CSPs. The charts below show the anonymized results. You can also access them online.

Analyzing the results

The results suggest strong intention from participating vendors to implement TM Forum Open APIs, but they are still relatively immature when it comes to rolling them out. Vendor maturity is somewhat ahead of CSP maturity, which is not surprising given that CSPs often are dependent on vendors to deliver compliant products before they can implement the APIs in live IT systems.

“In the pilot survey, we asked CSPs and vendors the same questions. This was helpful for matching CSPs’ priorities with vendors’ API maturity, for example, providing vendors with direction to focus on APIs which are important to CSPs,” says Andy Tiller, Executive Vice President, Collaboration & Innovation. “This approach under-represents of the true strategic intent of CSPs when it comes to Open API adoption, so we plan to supplement the CSP survey questions next time to better gauge their ambition.”

It is also no surprise that the most mature vendor deployments are from companies with smaller product portfolios that allow for quicker turnaround and adoption of new technologies.

Another key result of the assessments is that CSPs’ intent to adopt Open APIs is ahead of vendor intent for key API collections such as Resource and Service APIs.

“This should serve as motivation for vendors to adopt strategies for becoming partners to CSPs, particularly as CSPs begin deploying 5G,” Tiller says.

Find out how your company ranks

The Q3 VAAR and CAAR surveys are now open (click the links below to access them). We encourage you to participate to find out how your company’s deployment of Open APIs compares. Participants in the surveys also have the option to purchase personalized reports with restricted viewing to help benchmark implementation against the (anonymized) market. If you’d like more information about the Open API Adoption Assessment Reports, please contact Jon Coleman via jcoleman@tmforum.org.

Take the Vendor API Adoption Assessment Survey

Take the CSP API Adoption Assessment Survey