PLANO, Texas—In its continuing quest to build open APIs for the telecom industry, the TM Forum has added three new APIs to its portfolio.
Along with those three APIs, TM Forum announced an additional 17 APIs that were developed and contributed largely by Amdocs and Orange. Those 17 Open APIs for telcos were designed to improve the functionality for management of customer experience, products and services, and relationships with their partners and suppliers.
“These new and updated APIs will be used to support order activation sub processes such as customer management, quote management, offer qualification and product ordering, but also process flow to strengthen alignment with the Forum’s Open Digital Architecture principles,” said Orange's Ludovic Robert, IT senior architect, in a statement. "These functions are essential in ensuring service providers can not only transform their network IT for the digital world but also deliver new digital services.”
The three new TM Forum Open APIs are for event management, sales management and process.
TM Forum now boasts a suite of 57 REST-based Open APIs, which are used by more than 9,000 software developers in 1,300 companies. TM Forum's George Glass, vice president, architecture and APIs, said at this week's TM Forum Action Week conference that TM Forum's APIs were also being used by MEF for SD-WAN and by the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) automation and orchestration initiative.
"The beauty, from our perspective, is that some of our API team leads are also members of ONAP or MEF working groups," Glass said. "So they straddle both communities. They're promoting TM Forum APIs, because they've helped develop those, and then they are getting them adopted into both ONAP and MEF. We've designed the APIs to be customer segment, product and service agnostic."
Glass said TM Forum had taken a bit of break on publishing new APIs to focus on improving the quality. Additional APIs, such as IoT APIs or artificial intelligence APIs, are currently in the production process and some are close to publication.
RELATED: AT&T, DT, China Telecom throw support behind TM Forum's Open APIs
Today, 53 service providers stand behind TM Forum’s Open APIs by having signed the Forum’s Open API Manifesto. Those companies agreed to use the Open APIs in product applications and collaborate on future development and growth. In May, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Salesforce and China Telecom signed the manifesto. This month, Chunghwa Telecom added its name to the list.
To help companies self-assess their conformance to the Open APIs, the Forum offers Open API Conformance Certification, and recently published a pilot API adoption assessment report for service providers and vendors to help them understand their progress in implementing TM Forum Open APIs.