TM Forum Open APIs

Problem Statement

New product offers must be launched in days

Increased ecosystem integration demands

Increased agility demands

From a high-level context a Telco / Digital Service Provider designs unique and differentiating market offerings (product offerings) and take these offers to market and sell directly or via partners and channels.

As product offerings are rapidly changing as a result of imposed market forces as OTT and Cloud service vendors deliver services, CSPs/DSPs battle to maintain the pace required to introduce new offers and to automate product offer propagation across multiple traditional OSS/BSS platforms as well as new Digital Service platforms.

As differentiating digital market offers requires increasing adoption of new systems to deliver digital service value to market, the agility demands on market rollout can only be achieved with product catalog and offering standardisation and federation.

Solution Proposition

Standardise PLM with a TMF620 Master Catalog Implementation

Standardise decoupling and integration with Orcha iPaaS

By using a TMF620 API-first Master Product Catalog, lifecycles of new Product Offers can be managed end-to-end with semi-to fully-automated operations readiness by a variety of systems required to reference new offers to fulfil its operational functions. 

This is achieved with the TMF620 API combined with the following supporting elements:

• The Orcha Digital Integration Hub
• A Master (Canonical) Data Model and data store
• OSS/BSS/Digital Platform integration orchestration

Problem Statement

Rapid product portfolio expansion demands to grow revenue and profitability

Process standardisation is threatened as new business model stakeholders will challenge agility traditionally attained

”The next generation of telcos will be defined by leaders who act now, risking short-term advantages to seize untapped growth with a holistic approach to transformation.”

– A blueprint for telecom’s critical reinvention, McKinsey & Company, April 28, 2021 

There is no doubt that incumbent Telco’s are threatened by the new digital economies and need to expand their product portfolio, redefine and streamline process and improve customer offerings.

As portfolio is expanding as a growth imperative, Telco’s can easily stumble over process divergence for processes such as catalog management (product configuration), order management and product order fulfilment.

Process standardisation across the entire portfolio is difficult to attain as new business models will inevitably incorporate new technology platforms.

Solution Proposition

Product orders where line items are 100% based on universal catalog

Catalyses product cross-selling spanning traditional and new digital business model portfolio

Achieve API-first Order Capture across all purchase channels

TMF622 delivers a standard interface for product order creation and administration.

Importantly, each order item references Product Offerings specified by the TMF620 Product Catalog API.

The combination of the use of TMF622 and TMF620 creates a standard interface for product order placement based on a universal catalog spanning traditional as well as new digital business model product portfolio.

This is achieved with the TMF622 API combined with the following supporting elements:

• The Orcha Digital Integration Hub
• A Master (Canonical) Data Model and data store
• OSS/BSS/Digital Platform integration orchestration
• Integration with TMF620 Product Catalog Management API

Problem Statement

As service portfolio expands with Digital Services, increased buckets and balances dedicated to services exist

An efficient, universally available balance management interface is needed

As online charging demand for increasingly complex customer service portfolios continues to grow, balance management is an imperative for digital service models.

Balances are increasingly representative of allowances for specific services and in most modern account balance management functions (ABMF) these balances are targeted during online charging based on specific service types being charged for.

As customers expand their range of services with Telco’s to include new digital services, consolidated balance management and accessibility over ubiquitous access channels are critical. This omnichannel balance management availability is difficult to attain in the absence of standards-based interface that can readily be integrated into all access channel systems.

The following drivers place increased emphasis on a standard Balance Management API:

• Balance accessibility across traditional Telco Services and Digital Service Models.
• Blurring of the lines between prepaid-, post-paid and hybrid payment models and their associated balances.

Solution Proposition

Ubiquitous balance management integration across all customer access channels

Comprehensive coverage of balance management operations

Guaranteed transaction audit traces for all balance operations

TMF654 delivers a standard interface for operations such as:

• Balance Enquiries
• Balance top-ups
• Account balance adjustments
• Account balance transfers
• Balance reservations

The API delivers a high degree of auditability of all balance operations and the ability for external systems like Analytics Platforms to subscribe for real-time or near real-time feeds of any balance adjustments.

The Globetom solution uses the TMF654 API standard combined with the following supporting elements:

• The Orcha Digital Integration Hub
• A Master (Canonical) Data Model and data store
• OSS/BSS/Digital Platform integration orchestration
• Integration with Revenue Weaver as the Account Balance Management Function (ABMF)

Problem Statement

IoE mandates complex relationships between things

Lack of a common, reusable entity modeling mechanism will lengthen implementation times

Associations between entities and the rights obtained is governed, e.g GDPR

The networked connection of people, processes, data, and things is rapidly rising.

“The benefit of IoE is derived from the compound impact of connecting people, process, data, and things, and the value this increased connectedness creates as  everything comes online.”
– Cisco.

For CSPs to unlock IoE market potential, the need to have a modelling capability for the multi-dimensional association between things (entities) is foundational.

The same real-world things (entities) can exist in multiple ecosystem business models but with different associations and association contexts.

Solving this problem is not trivial unless a consistent model is used across multiple digital business models to provide consistency for various functions, e.g. transaction processing and monetisation.

Solution Proposition

Unified model for complex entity modelling

Generic model acting as registry to access specialised entity information spanning multiple partner and supplier domains

Manage contextualized entity associations

TMF662 delivers a comprehensive interface to model an entire digital ecosystem’s entities in a unified catalog. The entity catalog has the inherent capability to access specialised resource representations of the entity being modelled.

A Generic entity relationship modeler can be used to retrieve entity-specific details [end-to-end with semi-to fully-automated operations readiness by a variety of systems required to reference new offers to fulfil its operational functions.

This is achieved with the TMF662 API combined with the following supporting elements:

• The Orcha Digital Integration Hub
• A Master (Canonical) Data Model and data store
• OSS/BSS/Digital Platform integration orchestration

Problem Statement

High demand for access to systems and data through (Open) APIs

Support for SLAs and assurance of API QoS, availability, and performance

Support for different tiers and pricing of APIs based on volume usage

Open APIs
The world is evolving to the use of (Open) APIs for access to systems, things and data.

Internet of Everything
Furthermore, there is increasing demand for more APIs and access to more and different types of data within the new paradigm of the “Internet of Everything”.

Quality Assurance of APIs
To provide quality assurance of the APIs and the underlying data to the API Consumers, the providers of the APIs can best provide this as a paid for, pay as you go or subscription service.

API Monetisation and Pay as you go or Subscription Capability
To achieve this ideally requires an integration platform which enables APIs and supports charging for use of the APIs at a granular level.

Solution Proposition

Support for TMF Open APIs on Orcha Platform

Low-to-no-Code Process Orchestration at scale with low latency

Granular event based charging based on advanced policy engine

The Globetom Orcha platform supports the TMF Open APIs as well as other APIs, enabling underlying process integration for servicing experience layer API Calls with little to no-code development.

Orcha is also well integrated with the Globetom Revenue Weaver platform which supports real-time rating, balance management and charging for any type of entity including API calls.

The integrated Globetom platforms:

• The Orcha Digital Integration Hub
• Revenue Weaver advanced Policy-based Charging Engine

provide a highly flexible solution for supporting Open APIs with underlying process orchestration and integration as well as the capability to offer and support a range of charging solutions for the use of APIs calls in digital ecosystems, e.g. servicing Data Requests in Smart Citites or Control Requests in IoT environments.