My API story: Helping CSPs achieve business agility

Tell us about yourself and your job

I am an Enterprise Architect at CGI, leading transformation programs to deliver core business and operational systems for Communication Service Providers. At CGI, we help our customers in their digital transformation journey by modernizing legacy systems with purpose-built and future-ready solutions aligned to industry standards. We identify the right technologies and tools, partner with our diverse ecosystem, powered by our innovation and agile delivery methodologies to help customers achieve business agility, stay competitive, capitalize on blue ocean opportunities and increase market share.

What TM Forum Open APIs are most valuable to your company?
With the growing complexity of modern CSPs, there is a need to implement an extensible integration architecture for internal and third-party platforms to stay agile and deliver faster time-to-market. TM Forum’s Open API fundamentally addresses this by bringing different systems together across domains/platforms and provides significant benefits to the entire value chain.

We use most of TM Forum’s Open APIs in our engagements, the most frequent ones being:

• TMF 622 - Product Order
• TMF 641 - Service Order
• TMF 629 - Customer Inventory
• TMF 651 - Agreement Management
• TMF 638 - Service Inventory
• TMF 639 - Resource Inventory Management
• TMF 673 - Geographic Address
• TMF 674 - Geographic Site
• TMF 675 - Geographic Location
• TMF 688 - Event API Management
• TMF 637 - Product Inventory
• TMF 642 - Alarm management
• TMF 656 - Service Problem Management
• TMF 649 - Performance Management Threshold API
• TMF 621 - Trouble ticket API
• TMF 655 - Change Management
• TMF 653 - Service Test Management

Why did you choose to highlight those APIs?

Based on CGI’s industry insights, for CSPs to stay competitive, they need business agility driven by configuration-not-code solutions, seamlessly integrated systems that are easily extensible, operational agility provided by public cloud platforms and flexibility in driving efficiency through technologies like AIOps & RPA. To help us deliver solutions built on these principles, TMF Open APIs have proven to be highly beneficial in implementing enterprise-grade integrations quicker with minimal customizations that are extensible to meet growing business needs. These REST-based APIs are technology agnostic and can be used in any digital service scenario, including IoT, Smart Health, Smart Grid, Smart Home, Big Data, NFV, Next Generation OSS/BSS and much more.

At CGI, we have built an Open-API Accelerator kit that acts as a quick starter for the adoption of any TMF Open API. The accelerator can be hosted on-prem or on any cloud-native platform and supports various integration patterns. The accelerator enables us to realize the true value of TM Forum’s Open APIs within a very short period of time.

How do you use those APIs?

The Open APIs significantly reduce the Total Cost of Ownership of integrations by decreasing the cost to implement and maintain integrations among internal/external systems/platforms. They simplify heavy integrations in both homogeneous and heterogeneous IT environments where diverse IT systems integrate to deliver an end-to-end value stream. With the adoption of such industry-standard-based integration, it is easy to onboard additional integration platforms/systems as business needs continue to evolve.

Where do you use them?

We use them for our customers in North America & Europe.

Why do you believe in TM Forum’s Open API program?

Our configure-not-code approach delivered by COTS products, Open APIs, Open platforms and adoption of secure cloud are important today to modernize the conventional telco industry’s approach to service delivery. TM Forum’s industry-standard Open APIs enable interoperability across a heterogeneous ecosystem and trigger a mind shift towards open-source behaviors of transparency. It supports faster development, adoption and extensibility of complex solutions/integrations in a fraction of time. At CGI, we are committed to helping CSPs achieve business agility and we do so using a configure-not-code approach on cloud-native platforms with the help of TM Forum’s Open APIs.