My API story: Vodafone's API Architecture Guild

Florin Tene, Enterprise Architect, Vodafone Group, explains how and why Vodafone dedicates people, processes, guidelines, and tools to increase and support the adoption, usage, and development of TM Forum's industry-standard Open APIs as part of its 'telco to tech' evolution.

Tell us about yourself and your job

I am part of the Digital, BSS & APIs architecture team in Vodafone, focusing on APIs standardization, strategy, and roadmaps. In my role, I'm currently leading a distributed architecture function called the API Architecture Guild. It is created on the open-source behaviors of transparency, participation, and efficacy with a role to provide the people, processes, guidelines, and tools to increase and support the adoption, usage, and development of TM Forum's industry-standard Open APIs across our digital landscape. Currently, the API Guild includes over 120 API experts from countries where Vodafone is present. As part of the API Guild output, Vodafone is feeding back to the TM Forum Open API program and community with new APIs proposals, patterns, and tools.

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

As part of Vodafone's five-year Tech2025 strategy, we're implementing a digital-first customer engagement plan.

A vital part of the strategy is leveraging industry-standard APIs in our platform business model approach to building connected ecosystems.

We have a zero-cost integration target and plan, which mandates that all our strategic interactions are fully aligned to our common API standards and definitions. A coherent set of APIs is foundational to the success of this approach, so Vodafone engaged early in the adoption and development of the industry-standard TM Forum Open APIs.

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

In Vodafone, across our local markets, we have over 259 implementations of the TM Forum Open APIs, exposing capabilities from all domains (sales, customer, product, service, etc.). Across the landscape of our local markets, we're currently using 43 unique TM Forum Open APIs available from the catalog. We have calculated a list of the top 10 most re-used TM Forum Open APIs across our strategic projects and initiatives or local market projects:

• TMF632 - Party
• TMF666 - Account
• TMF622 - Product Ordering
• TMF637 - Product Inventory
• TMF620 - Product Catalog
• TMF679 - Product Offering Qualification
• TMF680 - Recommendation
• TMF677 - Usage Consumption
• TMF629 - Customer management
• TMF678 - Customer Bill

How do you use those APIs?

Our teams are led by the API-First golden rule, leveraging re-usable, standardized APIs across our IT and Network domains to reduce complexity and foster simplicity as a prelude to agility and innovation. Each TM Forum Open API defines the exchange of information relevant to specific business interactions. For example: Creating a Customer, Placing a Product Order, or Raising a Trouble Ticket. These are simple atomic transactions that build - like Lego bricks - into repeatable higher-order digital experiences.

Exposing technical capabilities across all products, IT, and networks as simplified building blocks allow us to innovate at speed because we can recompose capabilities with virtually zero integration tax. Being able to build quickly enables us to experiment rapidly and be more adventurous.

How have you benefited from using these APIs?

Uniform adoption of a globally recognized, industry-standard set of APIs across our entire business makes integration within operators and third parties simpler and faster. Adopting TM Forum's Open APIs helped us in many ways:

• Internal integration – the APIs provide a common language for our platforms, allowing us to share our capabilities to construct global products and services regardless of the underlying vendors.
• External integration – the APIs enable us to provide a consistent technical "face" to our partners and co-dependent operators worldwide.

Where do you use the APIs?

Vodafone is one of the largest mobile and fixed network operators in Europe and the world's biggest IoT connectivity provider with a presence in 21 countries and partner with mobile networks in 48 more. We're using the TM Forum Open APIs in all our local markets and across the digital, BSS, and OSS domains. Having TM Forum Open APIs exposed straight from our vendors' products and solutions offers a high interoperability level, getting us closer to our zero-cost integration plan.

As part of our 'telco to tech' evolution, we are focusing more on DevOps-driven development of scalable platforms, where high interoperability is mandatory, so we've embedded requirements for TM Forum Open APIs in our RFQ processes, and we are validating all the TM Forum Open APIs exposed.

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