We speak to Jasharaj Deshpande, Digital Solution Partner, Communications, Media & Technology, UK & I, Cognizant, who discusses how and why the company used a whole host of TM Forum Open APIs to help develop its 5G digital marketplace.
Ailis Claassen
01 Aug 2019
My API story: 5G Digital Marketplace
We speak to Jasharaj Deshpande, Digital Solution Partner, Communications, Media & Technology, UK & I, Cognizant, who discusses how and why the company used a whole host of TM Forums Open APIs to help develop its 5G digital marketplace.
Tell us about yourself and your job
As a Digital Solution Partner, I help create digital strategy and solutions that enable clients to harmonize their business and technology architectures to generate growth and enable competitive advantage.
I am currently leading Cognizant’s 5G digital marketplace product development which delivers a B2B2X marketplace and allows CSPs to get a head-start by not only selling 5G connectivity, but also in cross industry digital products bundled with IoT offerings, thus enabling faster monetization leveraging 5G. This involves building a strong digital blueprint to deliver quote-to-order and procure-to-pay process underpinned by connected customer experience and an intelligent 5G Network Slice Manager.
What TM Forum Open APIs are most valuable to your company?
As a global ‘system integrator’, we at Cognizant strive to implement APIs based on the business needs of our clients covering the entire telecom domain. In particular, for building our 5G digital marketplace, and in the Catalyst project we participated in for Digital Transformation World in Nice, we used the following TM Forum Open APIs:
Product Catalog API
Product Ordering API
Service Level Agreement API
Loyalty API
IoE/IoT Data Management API
Onboarding API
Recommendations API
Service Quality Management API
Why did you choose to highlight those APIs?
The 5G Digital Marketplace required us to build automated quote-to-order and procure-to-pay processes. Our concept core theme was to have multiple cross industry, cross segment CPQ engines and workflows running in parallel. Secondly, we had an important use case to demonstrate automated IoT (M2M) request for additional network resource based on the performance and experience delivered. This required us to look for scalable and loosely coupled APIs, which are common and consistent across telco industry.
Thus, we used the Open APIs I listed.
How do you use those APIs?
We use the product catalog API by appending the context and location of products purchased and dynamic pricing calculated based on the merit of the product bundled, location and context of the customer experience. We then extended the product order API to have consistent order parameters to enable our BSS layer for real time validation and order management. The SLA API is used to track and monitor the thresholds of the performance committed during product purchase. Any dynamic reduction in performance would result in changes to automated updating of partner service credits. To address this, we used the loyalty API and onboarding API to define the workflow levels. The IoT management API was extended to share automated request to extend the network resource used based on alerts received for threshold breach.
How have you benefited from using these APIs?
Using TM Forum Open APIs enables us to build interoperability around cross industry market places. It allows seamless design of the Digital BSS layer to scale and accommodate multi industry product bundles. It enables robust management of e2e business services being delivered by our 5G Digital Marketplace. It also eliminates barriers for IoT and OTT players to easily access interfaces and extend services to deliver flexible digital experience to delight customers. Also, as the Open APIs are technology agnostic this made it advantageous for us to collaborate and build key offerings with cross industry digital players and have ease of integration with their platforms.
Where do you use them?
We use the Open APIs to provide services to our telecom clients globally across APAC, NA, UK&I, Europe and Middle East regions.
Have you used them in conjunction with any other APIs?
To start, we always use TM Forum Open APIs model as a reference to design telecom client’s digital offerings. The Open APIs are used as an initial blueprint to validate our design process. We then extend the API’s based on clients bespoke needs to deliver expected performance, customer experience and operational agility. This also involves using TM Forum Open APIs in conjunction with some bespoke APIs available at client premises. This could be around geo-location tracking, customer segmentation data and metrics, fraud detection, loyalty and product offerings.