My API story: Out-of-the-box integration

Tell us about yourself and your job

I work with Salesforce as a senior software engineer. I bring more than 10 years of experience developing large and mid-scale enterprise products, mainly in the telecom domain. I am a technology enthusiast and always focus on customer experience. We have adapted TM Forum’s architecture frameworks (including SID and Open APIs) over the past 2 years. I am currently working on designing next generation Open APIs for our solutions.

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

TM Forum Open APIs help with standardization of APIs across complex ecosystem services. They bring flexibility to our products or solutions enabling us to support different business models and enterprises worldwide. Also, it saves us a significant amount of time and effort in developing and deploying APIs from scratch and providing seamless connectivity and interoperability across customers.

What TM Forum Open APIs are most valuable to your team?

The top three we currently use are:

• TMF620 - Product Catalog Management API
• TMF645 - Service Qualification API
• TMF673 - Geographic Address API

Why did you choose to highlight those APIs?
These Open APIs are fundamental and highly relevant for catalog driven BSS, which is a foundational integration for CSPs and ISPs. In our solution offerings - catalog, product, ordering and inventory are the basic fundamental blocks to our solution offerings. Therefore, these APIs enable our customer modelling to be easily achieved using TMF concepts and models.

How do you use those APIs?

TM Forum’s Open APIs are a must-have for customers aiming to build an enterprise architecture aligned with TM Forum architecture frameworks. Supporting these APIs in our product suite introduces a high level of interoperability. CSPs are readily able to plug in our solution to an Open API standards ecosystem with minimal effort. This out-of-the-box integration helps improve deployment processes by saving time and effort. It also gives us an advantage and makes us easily integrable with our customer’s environment.

Where do you use the APIs?

Our telecom customers use the APIs for their digital transformation and integration. TM Forum’s Open APIs have built-in functionalities within the communications cloud products.

Have you used them in conjunction with any other APIs?

TM Forum’s Open APIs (TMF 620, 645, 673 and others in the future) will be used in the context of customer journeys - Pre-Order, Order, Care and Customer-360. We also plan to extend the application of these APIs with the product-specific payloads that have been built by the members of the MEF (Metro Ethernet Forum) community.