In this increasingly digitized world, technology is not only connecting more and more people but also more and more of the things we use daily as part of our modern lives. Innovative CSPs see that by exposing their capabilities as APIs enable new partnership models to enhance services, find new revenue streams and faster capitalization of assets through increased usage via micro and cross industry exposure. By embracing “Platform” based business models, to efficiently leverage an operator’s core assets and provide competitive differentiation.
Openet has been a long-time advocate and enabler of this. Back in 2011, we launched our Subscriber Engagement Engine which give a new channel to operators by enabling a common gateway to allow applications to easily interact with complex back-end operator systems through a common API abstraction layer. For example, enabling real time interaction with a policy control and charging (PCC) infrastructure to enable dynamic purchase of services.
This was soon followed by our Partner Engagement Platform that facilitated the automation of the complexities involved in on-boarding third parties needing to enable delivery of network services. By empowering partners with the ability to access and configure network services with minimal implementation effort, both the range of new services and the time to market for these services was dramatically improved.
Today, Openet’s Digital Business Platform exemplifies the power of open APIs as an enabler of Digital transformation. By supporting open APIs, the Digital Enablement platform becomes a true Trusted Business Platform for partner enablement. For example, enabling CSPs to partner with enterprise and content companies to extend their offerings and supporting new “Sell-thru, Sell-with, and Sell-to” concepts. New digital services can combine a CSP’s offerings with a partner’s one to create innovative composite offerings for personalized experiences that enhance the lives of its customers.
Moreover, by exposing the CSPs capabilities as APIs, new multi sided business models can be considered such as partners selling composite services, for example in the IoT space or gaining access to the lucrative mobile advertising market by simplifying engagement with advertising companies using sponsored data.
Partners can now be easily on-boarded thanks to modern interface technology that is quick to setup and deploy without the partner needing specialist domain expertise to combine communication capabilities with their creative products.
And we are not alone. Openet is delighted in joining the world’s leading service providers and technology ecosystem participants in endorsing the TM Forums Open API Manifesto. In particular, the TMFs open digital API definitions enable a new paradigm of business and operational agility for the digital economy extending value-chains and encouraging innovation with unprecedented business and technology integration between an operator and its partner companies.
Underlining the delivery of this business and operational agility is our Digital Business Platform. It follows the design vision proposed by the TMF’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA), by utilising cloud native micro services as Lego-like building blocks driven by Open APIs. As the TMF evolves ODA, Openet will be at the vanguard in adopting TM Forum-compliant APIs and providing the building blocks or “Framelets” as architectural components that can be combined with other vendors’ and Open Source offerings all working together seamlessly. Ultimately, ODA can delivery all the capabilities previously siloed in independent BSS and OSS stacks using a truly open selection of multiple vendors and open source and the end of vendor lock-in.
