The Case for Enforcing the Adoption of OSS/J Order Management API

The TM Forum recently released its new standards-based OSS/J order management API – called Information Framework JSR-264 – that enables OSS providers to fully interoperate with certified BSS and CRM vendors. This TM Forum open API standard eases interoperability among back-office and CRM vendors, resulting in speedier service rollouts, improved operational efficiencies and reduction in deployment costs by as much as 30 percent.

As Next-generation Operators (NGOs) undergo service transformation and evaluate back-office vendors, they can have the upper hand by mandating the adoption of the newest standards-based APIs to simplify the transformation process. Standardized APIs remove a major bottleneck that slows the introduction of new services: interoperability among OSS, billing and CRM solutions.

While the Order Management API is becoming commonplace as a requirement in customer contracts, many BSS/OSS vendors have been slow to adopt it. OSS solutions based on proprietary APIs cannot cope with the rapidly increasing scale of networks, the diversity of communications technology, the required shortened time to market for new services and the increased expectations for availability and reliability. NGOs need to capitalize on the latest developments and require their vendors to adopt the latest API. Without having other vendors standardized on this latest API, NGOs are forced to engage in time-consuming and budget draining integration projects to automate BSS-OSS order capture and management. The OSS/J order management API enables NGOs to select best-of-breed solutions and provides the operator and its vendors with consistent models of communication to make new concepts/capabilities easier to add through the back-office or IT chain.

One of the reasons to postulate on why the OSS/J order management API has not been broadly adopted by some of the “upstream” BSS vendors is the scope of functionality from the earlier version of the API, which only encompassed activation and provisioning.  The latest standard can also be used for resources, work orders and other capabilities, giving it a broader set of functionality.  Solutions based on this API can reuse the wealth of existing subscriber, service/network inventory and order management domain knowledge captured in the API— without requiring the operator to reinvent the wheel — thus reducing development and integration costs among deployed OSS, BSS and NMS systems.

NGOs and the TM Forum have put a lot of effort into the latest OSS/J management API. In order to reap the full benefits, service providers should expect all back-office system providers to adopt the API into their solution.