My API Story: Advancing Customer Ecosystems

Tell us about yourself and your job?

I am a seasoned professional in the telecommunications industry on both the service provider and technology vendor sides. I currently work in the CloudBlue North American Sales team helping telco and ISV clients and prospects to understand the power of Cloudblue Monetization platform, to establish scaleable marketplaces as well as reseller channels for digital products. This has increased the Average Revenue Per User, and Annual Recurring Revenue for the company. In this initiative, CloudBlue worked with design and development partner Infosys to develop these APIs.

Why do you believe in TM Forum’s Open API program?

TM Forum Open API’s are well recognized in the telco industry and within the prospects and customers ecosystem in which we are participating, and this program helps businesses and companies to cut the time and effort required for integrating their systems with CloudBlue. Without the APIs, the service providers must learn and become proficient in proprietary data models and API resources, whereas with TM Forum Open API’s, the service providers already have skilled staff who are well versed with the standard TM Forum data models and APIs. This helps to reduce the time required to understand and map the data to appropriate data elements. Whenever the internal design or data model of CloudBlue must be changed for whatever reason, TM Forum compliant interfaces are not impacted as they already work with TM Forum Open APIs, thus significantly reducing any impact on external service provider’s’ systems.

What TM Forum Open APIs are most valuable to your company? 

The following TM Forum Open APIs are most valuable for us:

• TMF641 Service Order
• TMF622 Product Order
• TMF637 Product Inventory
• TMF620 Product Catalog
• TMF629 Customer
• TMF632 Party

There are many more that are also valuable such as Agreement, Usage, Payment, Payment Method and we are interested in these as well.

Why did you choose to highlight these APIs?

In the telecommunications industry, we are enabling service providers to transform into digital service providers through transacting digital solutions and automating the ordering, provisioning and billing of such solutions. Our CloudBlue platform has two main components,: Catalog management and Commerce management, and each component has multiple micro services with different functions that serve to automate the supply chain. With these micro services CloudBlue has the capability to manage the resources such as customers, accounts, products, product offers, product orders, service orders and so on. As the industry is moving to standard API management, we desire to create TM Forum compliant APIs for all these API resources, starting first with Product Order, Customer, Party, Product and Product Offering, to fulfil the basic transactions involved in the supply chain of digital solutions.

How do you use these APIs?

Our Product Order API is used by external ordering systems in the service provider applications landscape to create a product order for a digital product such as Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 offered on Cloudblue Marketplace. The Customer and Party API is used by external customer relationship management systems to create new customer accounts in CloudBlue and synchronize external account management systems and CRMs. Once a customer is created, then a Product Order can be placed via the  Product Order API for a particular customer. The Product Offering API is used to synchronize the service provider’s master product catalog with CloudBlue, so that all create, read, update and delete (CRUD) operations on offerings in CloudBlue can be synchronized to the external catalog. Moreover, the Product Inventory API is used by external subscription management systems to query for customer subscriptions.

How have you benefited from using these APIs?

The Open APIs have reduced the time required by service providers to standardize the way they are holistically integrating their systems such as Customer Relationship Management systems, product catalog systems, ordering systems, billing systems and subscription management systems with CloudBlue. Moreover, they have brought a significant reduction in any changes needed to CloudBlue’s data model due to their integration with external service provider systems in the BSS/OSS landscape. The external system, if complying to TM Forum Open API standards, is not impacted in these cases, as the TM Forum Open API will remain the same. This implemented set of APIs acts as a base skeleton which can be further improvised while integrating to external systems.

Where do you use them? 

We are currently using the Open APIs in both India as well as the United States, with two operating companies. We also plan to install them in the Infosys DTS Lab for showing service provider prospects the possibilities for integrating their systems such as Salesforce and ServiceNow with CloudBlue. The first API design was born in the Catalyst project of 2023 “Paving the Way for Dynamic Network Sharing” and then continued with our own Infosys – CloudBlue lab as the basis for a real production engagement project for one of the largest North American providers that is doing a product evaluation using our technology to fulfil digital services.

Have you used them in conjunction with any other APIs?

These TM Forum Open APIs are used as an alternative to the native CloudBlue APIs, which are not TM Forum compliant, and we are using a translation mechanism when applicable between both worlds.