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APIs are becoming a significant catalyst for business growth. McKinsey refers to APIs as “the connective tissue in today’s ecosystems.” Allowing businesses to connect, forge profitable partnerships, monetize data and innovate. In December 2013, 150 coders crowded into a San Francisco conference, the first-ever public users of TM Forum’s new Open APIs. Today, our Open API program is a global initiative, collaboratively driven by members and formally supported by 127 of the world’s leading Communication Service Provider’s (CSP’s) And thanks to a small, committed team of solution architects and developers, their groundbreaking work, is now serving a massive and growing community of users. We’ve been providing specifications for standardized APIs since 2014. There are 6 specification documents that compose each API. They’re highly complex and require absolute precision. Until early 2020, when a member wanted to contribute to an API, they’d have to manually write all 6 specifications. One specification can contain up to 200,000 lines of code. Inevitable human error occurred, lowering quality, time to market (up to 6 months) and adoption. An inefficient, complex, manual and error prone approach. To address this, in 2020 TM Forum created a specific IT team with the objective of developing software that would make specifications automatic, reducing complexity and inefficiencies.
The Open API Tooling Team comprises 7 people from TM Forum, Telenor, Oracle, Vodafone, and City Fiber. Working collaboratively over a 12-month period, the team successfully developed a groundbreaking system that supports the creation of specifications automatically. A major obstacle was managing this project during the pandemic, without much needed face time they had to tackle it virtually. The team met 3 times per week and ran digital hackathons to brainstorm solutions fostering a quick-march, customer centric, can-do team culture.
The solution delivered immediate benefits, including:
- The automated solution is low code, allowing a broader range of people to create APIs, speeding up development.
- Human error went to zero
- Programming time reduced from 6 months to a couple of hours
As a result:
In summary, this small IT team of very smart, passionate, tenacious individuals delivered something quite phenomenal.
Their tooling solution significantly contributed to our recent major milestone of 500,000 downloads (a 250,000 increase since the program began), by over 32,000 software developers from 2,300 organizations. Given how critical API development is, this is a significant landmark, highlighting the important role they play in helping CSPs modernize their IT systems.
Thanks to the team’s work, today they are part of a much larger community of CSPs and partners using Open APIs to create faster and more flexible ways of working. A total of 124 of the world’s leading CSPs and technology ecosystem participants have publicly demonstrated their endorsement of TM Forum’s suite of Open APIs by signing the Open API Manifesto. Of these, 23 CSPs have agreed to position TM Forum Open APIs as a preferred requirement in their IT RFPs.
“CSPs recognize that Open APIs contribute to a common understanding of the language and business concepts in the industry, leading to easier integrations and hopefully lower costs,” says Jonathan Goldberg, Principal Integration Architect at Amdocs. And the team aren’t stopping there, determined to continue to innovate and advance Open API usage.
Nomination Title: Open Application Programming Interfaces (API) Tooling IT Team
