NICE, France — TM Forum Live! — Nine of the world’s biggest service providers have thrown their collective weight behind the TM Forum’s Open APIs initiative as they look to minimize the complexity of their back-office systems and tap into partnership opportunities.
Axiata Group Berhad , Bharti Airtel Ltd. (Mumbai: BHARTIARTL), BT Group plc(NYSE: BT; London: BTA), China Mobile Ltd. (NYSE: CHL), China Unicom Ltd.(NYSE: CHU), NTT Group (NYSE: NTT), Orange (NYSE: FTE), Telefónica andVodafone Group plc (NYSE: VOD) will adopt the APIs developed under the TM Forum program as part of their IT strategies, it was revealed earlier today at the TM Forum Live! event in Nice, France.
According to Joann O’Brien, VP of Industry Collaboration for the TM Forum, support for Open APIs will be something all service providers backing the initiative include in requests for proposal (RFPs) from January 2017.
“We started 18 months ago with simple APIs and now have a suite of 18,” said O’Brien at a press conference in Nice today. “Our target is to get 200 service providers across the globe adopting these by 2018 and we are confident we can gain support to meet that.”
In principle, the use of application programming interfaces (APIs) that are open and standardized should simplify the process of developing different service and IT platforms, allowing operators to reuse a set of common “catalog-based” components.
“APIs are a way of globalizing the company,” said Chris Boyd, the director digital architecture and transformation for Spain’s Telefónica, during the TM Forum’s press conference. “If I’m delivering direct to bill for 320 million customers I don’t want to have to do things numerous times or spend money on integration.”
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