Being able to plug platforms, partners, products and services together – fast – is how all kinds of companies are and will compete in the digital economy. This is already disrupting many industries massively, including telecommunications (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, streaming video), transport (Uber, Didi Chuxing), hotels (booking.com, Airbnb), banking (blockchain technology, peer-to-peer lending), insurance (O2 Drive in the UK) and retail (Alibaba, Amazon).
It also leaves the playing field wide open for innovation – according to Professor Geoffrey Parker, MIT Institute for the Digital Economy, speaking at TM Forum Live! at the beginning of May: “If you add up the profits of the top 50 publicly traded platform companies over the last five years, profits amount to over $1.3 trillion. In any market where the network effect [where the value of a product or service is dependent on the number of others using it] has become a central component of markets, the focus must shift from inside an organization to outside, or it cannot scale.”
Wireless communications providers are acutely aware of this, and if the point needed illustrating further, Twilio’s initial public offering on May 24, did it. The eight-year-old company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange (TWLO); as a private company it was valued at $1 billion, but by the end its first day trading as a public company, its worth had risen to $2.4 billion.
The Guardian newspaper described the reasons for its success: “Twilio provides a[n API-based] messaging platform for developers, which means that companies can use its tools and services to create their own messaging apps and features. It has stayed focused on helping software developers do things that were previously considered really hard. Huge barriers prevented developers from working with the different telecoms providers and their complicated SMS gateways, their many standards and protocols, and their unmanageable pricing structures. Twilio successfully broke down all the things that stopped developers from creating messaging features into a few simple pieces that made a whole new market possible.”
The really good bit is the last – Twilio made a whole new market possible by enabling things to work together that previously were discrete and incompatible, turned into plug and play by open APIs. Had the mobile communications industry used open APIs way, way back for SMS systems, network operators could have created that multi-billion-dollar market for themselves and their partners.
Now they are determined to take advantage of the massive opportunities of the platform economy. In May at TM Forum Live! nine of the world’s leading service providers endorsed the core set of 18 open APIs, which they helped develop within the Forum, for everyone to use for digital services’ management.
The APIs can be used in a range of scenarios, internally enabling service providers to transform their IT and operational agility and customer-centricity, while externally delivering a practical approach to seamless end-to-end management of complex digital services – including SDN and NFV.
China Unicom, NTT-Group, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone are committed to using, endorsing and specifying this suite of 18 APIs as part of their request-for-proposal processes from January 2017 for products and cloud-based services.
At the press conference for the announcement, George Glass, Chief Systems Architect, BT, explained how his company had contributed its considerable work on building a platform-based architecture so it could “design APIs once and use them multiple times.”
He explained, “We have implementations of those APIs, at scale, out there today, performing our business. So we’re not starting this journey like it’s a voyage of discovery to find out if it will work – it absolutely does work. All of our broadband ordering in the UK today flows through the open APIs around customer, account and billing. That’s how we run our business in the UK. They do work and we are standing behind them.”
Speculation that the announcement was similar to the GSMA’s OneAPI initiative back in 2013 was refuted at the press conference by Chris Boyd, Group Director, Digital Architecture and Transformation, Telefónica, who said, “The technology is much more standard, the code is much clearer and we’re much clearer about our aims, so there’s more opportunity now for them to be successful. We’re also bringing the suppliers in as well.”
Laurent Leboucher, Vice President APIs and Digital Ecosystem, Orange, added, “What we’re doing here is defining a set of standards that we can apply to in different geographies to support different operations. We, within Orange, are already using those APIs and they work. There is no question about scalability, reliability and so on. I believe that in terms of functional scope, it’s a much wider scope than the original One API initiative…[it is] the management of systems – digital ecosystems – and this also applies to our operations”.
The diversity of purposes the APIs can be used for has been demonstrated by developers competing at a series of open hacks, run by the Forum, supported by Ericsson and IBM. At the most recent one, at Nice in May, teams of hackers from Nice and other cities globally competed for cash prizes, pitching their ideas about how to use the APIs to make cities smarter and more sustainable. The winners came up with Garden Sharing, a solution to connect people who have a garden to share and those who’d like use of one, and also create new ways to grow food and collectively care for plants.
Other ideas included City of Things, an idea based on an app that relies on ‘social nudging’ and gaming – do good things for your city and get rewards. This team observed, “You’d be surprised what people will do for a free coffee”.
Looking forward, TM Forum, a not-for-profit organization, has set an ambitious target of having 200 service providers from all over the world adopt TM Forum Open APIs by 2018.
Joann O’Brien is TM Forum’s Vice President of APIs & Ecosystems. She has worked in technology for over 20 years in a mixture of management and engineering roles. Currently, Joann is leading the Innovation & Smart Climate programs at TM Forum, engaging developers and startups across the globe, as well as leading exploration on the role of technology for climate change mitigation.
