DTW 2022: Axiata CIO Anthony Rodrigo on lessons learned while building an API marketplace

Axiata Group, a leading telecommunications group in Asia with operations serving 350 million subscribers in 11 countries, has learned from its mistakes in launching an API marketplace aimed at small businesses, according to the company’s Group Chief Information Officer Anthony Rodrigo.

The company leveraged its network assets to create the Ideamart marketplace (first in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh with plans to expand elsewhere), with the aim of enabling small businesses to reach their own customers. The idea was to empower the businesses to develop innovative services on the Axiata network and get paid quickly by customers.

“We had some failures,” Rodrigo said, speaking at Digital Transformation World in Copenhagen. “Few developers came in, and even those who shopped for APIs, from checkout to making money from the APIs was very low. And as a result, the value creation for both us and developers was pretty low.”

This led Axiata on a journey to find out why the marketplace wasn’t working. “We were wondering, is it the APIs that we expose? Is it our go-to-market campaigns? … Or is it developer experience?”

The team found that the answer was none of the above.

“The issue was really around education and engagement,” Rodrigo explained. “We had to go beyond the marketplace – we had to really build cool tools for developers. We had to engage developers in very different way.”

That included a lot of coaching, education and reaching out to schools and universities, which still wasn’t enough. So, Axiata added social media engagement, hundreds of outreach programs and thousands of hackathons and meetups.

In the end, the company’s perseverance paid off. “As of last year, we have around 70,000 developers and 90,000 apps monetized,” Rodrigo said. Those apps generated revenues of more than $100 million in 2021 for Axiata. “And a nice side effect of this was that it had an impact on our IT transformation – a massive impact,” Rodrigo added.

Running on ODA

Some of Axiata’s marketplace success can be attributed to its work with TM Forum. Indeed, Axiata is one of three communications service providers (CSPs) that were awarded with “Running on ODA” status at the event. Axiata is an early adopter of the TM Forum Open Digital Architecture (ODA) and Open APIs.

A CSP is Running on ODA if it meets the following criteria:

• ODA is its default reference enterprise architecture.
• It has widespread ODA competence evidenced by ODA training certifications.
• The company is actively contributing to ODA development, driven by real-world operational needs.
• Open APIs are deployed and in operational use.
• Open API conformance is mandatory for its suppliers, and ODA competence is expected, evidenced by ODA training certifications

Axiata has also been an avid and active TM Forum Catalyst participant. In 2019, two Axiata operating companies, Robi in Bangladesh and Dialog in Sri Lanka, championed an award-winning TM Forum Catalyst proof of concept that included Axiata Digital Labs (ADL), the group’s technology hub, as a participant. In the first phase of the Catalyst, the team created a platform to decouple legacy business support system (BSS) capabilities and publish them via APIs. In addition, they built a marketplace – much like Apple or Android’s app stores – where communications service providers (CSPs) could publish their own applications for use by other operators.

The second phase of the project added significant complexity via a video surveillance use case that relied on software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN), 5G network slicing and edge computing. That phase also featured new capabilities in the marketplace including native software as a service (SaaS) offerings, such as identity management and cloud services.