Eight tech companies endorse TM Forum open APIs

TM Forum has announced that eight technology ecosystem participants – DGIT, EnterpriseWeb, Ericsson, Huawei, IBM, BearingPoint / Infonova, Oracle and UXP Systems – have officially endorsed the Forum’s suite of open APIs (application programming interfaces) for digital service management.

These companies follow in the footsteps of nine of the world’s largest communications service providers (CSPs) – Axiata, Bharti Airtel, BT, China Mobile, China Unicom, NTT-Group, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone – which made a similar commitment in May 2016.

TM Forum’s suite of 18 REST-based open APIs – which will expand to more than 22 by the end of 2016 – have been collaboratively developed within TM Forum’s agile environment over the past 18 months, and proven through a series of Forum Open Hacks and Catalyst proof-of-concept projects.  The APIs are being used in a range of scenarios, internally enabling service providers to transform their IT and operational agility and customer-centricity, while externally delivering a practical approach to seamless end-to-end management of complex digital services – including software defined networks (SDN) and network functions virtualisation (NFV). As part of a broader digital transformation agenda, the APIs will enable a wide range of revenue growth opportunities for service providers, global enterprises, and public sector organisations alike.

By formally adopting TM Forum’s Open APIs, these companies are committing to incorporate them in their products, thereby unlocking new growth opportunities for the industry as a whole. In addition, these technology partners will be integral players in the broader collaborative community, working with their service provider and systems integration counterparts to continuously innovate and enhance the suite of open APIs.

Through their support of TM Forum’s Open APIs in their products, they demonstrate their commitment to enhanced interoperability capabilities, which will ultimately simplify and reduce the cost of systems integration efforts for CSPs that are using the products, as well as enable CSPs to facilitate partnering and bring to market innovative new digital services more rapidly.

In the case of BT Group, a major contributor to TM Forum’s collaborative work, Open APIs are playing a major role in its transformation and go-to-market efforts. The company was able to reduce 4,500 systems to 26 platforms and 1,800 systems, as well as reduce new service introduction from eight months to mere hours in some cases. “We are building more APIs that will be available soon and have plans for how we’ll be using them in the future,” said George Glass, the chief systems architect at BT Group. “I can tell you that if you use TM Forum APIs, they will work because we are using them ourselves in mass markets for our customers.”

Joann O’Brien, the vice president of APIs and Ecosystems at TM Forum, added: “By reducing integration friction and enhancing interoperability, TM Forum’s Open APIs are becoming a critical asset in enabling digital ecosystem management. Capabilities such as rapid partner onboarding and effective management of the full partner lifecycle – including automated service-level agreements, policy management and revenue settlement – are fundamental as the enterprise level embraces our sharing economy.”

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