Nine of the world’s largest service providers – Axiata, Bharti Airtel, BT, China Mobile, China Unicom, NTT Group, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone – have officially adopted TM Forum’s suite of Open APIs for digital service management.
In a statement, TM Forum said these service providers have committed to adopt TM Forum Open APIs as a foundational component of their IT architectures; to promote global adoption of the API suite by their partners; and to expect technology vendors and systems integrators to support these APIs in their products and cloud-based services.
“One lesson from hyper-scale internet companies is that APIs and platforms allow the creation of a standards-based ecosystem, while enabling innovation in the implementation,” said Lester Thomas, chief systems architect at Vodafone Group.
“A critical advantage of platforms and APIs is that they provide an evolutionary path from the current telco operating model to the future Network-as-a-Service model,” said Thomas.
The new suite of 18 REST-based Open APIs have been collaboratively developed within TM Forum’s agile environment over the past 18 months, and proven through a series of Catalyst proof-of-concept projects.
The APIs can be 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 SDN and NFV.