www.tmforum.

org

OPEN APIs:
TURNING BUSINESS
STRATEGY INTO REALITY
OCTOBER 2016

www.tmforum.org/open-apis

CONTENTS

Executive summary ........................................................................3

Chapter 1: The market and opportunity....................................4
Chapter 2: API strategy is integral to business planning ......6
Chapter 3: How do you implement the API strategy,
then keep it on track? ..................................................................10
Chapter 4: The innovation culture............................................16
Appendix 1: TM Forum Open API Roadmap ............................18

Author
Joann OBrien,
Vice President,
Open APIs & Ecosystems
jobrien@tmforum.org
Editor
Annie Turner,
Senior Director,
Editorial
aturner@tmforum.org
Advisors
Pierre Gauthier, Chief API Architect, TM Forum
John Wilmes, Director, Open Digital Ecosystem Project, TM Forum

2016. The entire contents of this publication are protected by copyright. All rights reserved. The views and opinions expressed by individual authors and contributors in this publication are provided in the writers
personal capacities and are their sole responsibility. Their publication does not imply that they represent the views or opinions of TM Forum and must neither be regarded as constituting advice on any matter whatsoever,
nor be interpreted as such. The reproduction of advertisements and sponsored features in this publication does not in any way imply endorsement by TM Forum of products or services referred to therein.

Open APIs: Turning business strategy into reality

EBOOK

EXECUTIVE
SUMMARY
Platform-enabled businesses and business models have
reshaped many global sectors in the last decade and will
profoundly change many more. The purpose of this ebook
is first to show how APIs are a fundamental, strategic asset
for every business whether a startup or incumbent, a
multinational or a government department, a digital health,
Internet of Things/Everything (IoT/E) or smart grid provider,
among others.
The second aim is to show how to
ensure that APIs are used consistently
and strategically in support of
business goals. Just how fundamental
this is to a platform business was
demonstrated by Google buying
Apigee for a reported $625 million in
September 2016.
Two of the most important attributes
of a platform-based business are that
they are modular and facilitate
interconnectivity with third parties.
Modularity allows systems to be
assembled, disassembled and
reassembled quickly, cheaply and
easily, while external interconnectivity
allows for easy, rapid connectivity
outside the organization.
APIs make this possible they are the
interfaces used by Google Maps, the
New York Stock Exchange, Salesforce,
Thomson Reuters Eikon, Twitter and

www.tmforum.org

Amazon, among others, plus

communications service providers
around the world to give external
organizations access to selected core
resources.
APIs are not new they enable
conversations between software
systems for a multitude of purposes.
But the technology they are built on,
their functions and roles have evolved.
In particular, in the digital era, open
that is, publicly available, standardized
APIs have proliferated massively and
are used by many companies, including
those mentioned above, to encourage
external talent to exploit those core
assets to everyones advantage.
For this reason, TM Forums member
organizations have developed a suite
of 18 open APIs, with more in the
pipeline, to open up their terrific
assets and indeed Chapter 1 is

dedicated to exploring the scale and

scope of the opportunity open to
them. Note that although the open
APIs have been developed by
incumbent and other
communications and technology
providers, their application is by no
means limited to the communications
industry, as we show in Chapter 4.

Read this ebook to understand:

n What platform businesses are and
why theyre successful
n What APIs are
n How to use APIs to enable new
business models
n How to implement an API strategy
and keep it on track
n How TM Forums other assets can
work together with APIs
n Why establishing a culture of
innovation is necessary for success
We hope you enjoy this primer on APIs
and find it useful. Many thanks to our
Collaboration Community for their
help in creating this publication, in
particular Andreas Polz from Infonova
and Jean-Luc Tymen from Orange, our
team leaders in the Open API project.

www.tmforum.org/open-apis

CHAPTER 1 THE MARKET

AND OPPORTUNITY
Amazons
founder Jeff
Bezos, was quick
to understand the
power of APIs to
expand and
reshape a
business.

A platform business is defined in the groundbreaking book,

Platform Revolution, as, a business based on enabling
value-creating interactions between external producers and
consumers. The platform provides an open, participative
infrastructure for these interactions and sets governance
conditions for them. The platforms overarching purpose: To
consummate matches between users and facilitate the
exchange of goods, services, or social currency, thereby
enabling value creation for all participants.
Unlocking value

this mandate was sent out by Bezos:

APIs play a critical role in unlocking the

usefulness of data and information
assets by enabling them to be
combined with internal or external
assets. They allow unparalleled speed
and scale for mashed-up services,
bringing all kinds of information,
individuals, companies and other
organizations together for purposes
limited only by imagination. These
interfaces enable the platform
business model as well as other
collaborative models.
Amazons founder Jeff Bezos, was
quick to understand the power of APIs
to expand and reshape a business.
According to former Amazon
employee, Steve Yegge, circa 2002

n All teams will henceforth expose

their data and functionality through
service interfaces.
n Teams must communicate with
each other through these
interfaces.
n There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no
direct linking, no direct reads of
another teams data store, no
shared-memory model, no backdoors whatsoever. The only
communication allowed is via service
interface calls over the network.
n It doesnt matter what technology
they use.

Open APIs: Turning business strategy into reality

EBOOK

n All service interfaces, without

exception, must be designed from
the ground up to be externalizable.
That is to say, the team must plan
and design to be able to expose the
interface to developers in the
outside world. No exceptions.
The mandate closed with:

Anyone who doesnt do this

will be fired. Thank you; have
a nice day!
This enabled many new areas to thrive
while growing the core business. For
instance, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
was born estimates put AWS value
at $160 billion if it were a company in
its own right. For a long time, AWS was
the only part of the company that
made money. Crucially, this enabled
Amazon to invest in other parts of the
business (retail, devices, its
Marketplace for third-party sellers,
producing TV content) that are a
longer-term play. AWS still contributes
most of the profit, which bodes well for
anyone looking to grow fast by opening
up their infrastructure.
Further, the platform business model
functions at many levels within Amazon.
For example, Inter-departmental
interactions work on the same basis as
those with external parties at Amazon,
but also a third-party bookseller can sell
through Amazon Marketplace or set up
its own, competing online store through
AWS, or do both.

The network effect

Platform businesses benefit from the
network effect, whereby a large, wellmanaged platform community
produces value for each member of
that community. So Uber makes hailing
a cab more convenient. Word spreads,
more drivers sign up and more
passengers find a ride more quickly
and use the service more, so drivers
waste less time between jobs.

www.tmforum.org

Less downtime means lower fares are

viable, which stimulates more
demand. This virtuous cycle means
coverage becomes denser, and
encourages others to start up
elsewhere. Hence being able to scale
rapidly is a key attribute.

Morphing business models

Another key characteristic is that
platform businesses can morph or
grow by leveraging their assets in new
ways. For example, Uber is planning to
spend half a billion dollars developing
its own maps (using cameras in its cars)
because Google Maps arent detailed
enough for its future business model of
using driverless vehicles for all kinds of
deliveries, not just passengers.

Big winners is no exaggeration: The

profits of the top 50 publicly-traded
platform companies over the last five
years, amount to over $1.3 trillion. The
largest market, North America, is worth
more than $1 trillion measured by
market capitalization, and arguably were
only in the first wave, with the Internet of
Everything (IoE) still in its infancy.
The IoE will dwarf todays person-toperson communications market,
whichever prediction you believe.
According to Deloittes Tech Trends
2015: The fusion of business and IT, APIs
are the backbone of the opportunity.
Whoever manages and monetizes
the underlying services of the IoT could
be poised to reshape industries.

The size of the opportunity is

HUGE
IBM describes what it calls the API
economy as a commercial exchange of
business functions, capabilities, or
competencies as services packaged in
APIs... [it] is the driving force behind much
of the digital transformation across
industries today, enabling business
leaders to transform their organizations,
build new ecosystems, and monetize
core assets, services and products.
IBMs estimate is that the API Economy
will be a $2.2 trillion market by 2018.
According to research house Ovum,
during the next two to three years, the
number of enterprises having an API
program is expected to increase by
150 percent.

In this market,
if companies can
overcome their
organizational
inertia,
incumbents
actually have
every opportunity
to be the big
winners in each
industry with
APIs.
Sam Ramji, VP, Strategy, Apigee

Arguably incumbents in many sectors

have the advantage because as Sam
Ramji, Vice President of Strategy,
Apigee, explained in a recent interview
with PwC, The winners in the API game
overall are going to be the smartest
legacy businesses, because they have
an unfair advantage of decades of
transaction data as well as other
information and data assets."

www.tmforum.org/open-apis

CHAPTER 2: API
STRATEGY IS INTEGRAL
TO BUSINESS PLANNING
Weve established that APIs are strategic assets, not tactical
fixes, and they must be aligned with the business strategy to
make it happen. Googles acquisition of Apigee, the enterprise
API management company, on September 8, underlines this.
The acquisition cost a reported $625
million and is one of Googles largest in
recent times. Apigee will play a vital
role in advancing Googles cloudbased services for enterprises. An
article in Forbes, claimed, It will
become the crucial bridge between
the massive Google developer
community and its cloud platform,
and concluded, This move from
Diane Greene [Vice President, Cloud
Platform, Google] will be remembered
by the industry as the masterstroke.

Jay Barneys VRIO model (see Figure

2-1), although created in the 1990s,
has particular relevance when
considering which assets provide the
greatest opportunity for sustained
strategic advantage in a data- and
platform-driven business world. Put
another way, to identify the assets that
differentiate you in the market. Barney
suggested the key criteria were:

Where to begin?

n Imitability (Is it difficult to Imitate?)

A first step to align business and API

strategies should be an internal
evaluation of which assets and
capabilities your organization could
make available to third parties for
sharing, reuse and/or resale, using
different partnering and business
models to create new revenue streams.

n Value (Is it valuable?)

n Rarity (Is it rare?)

n Organization (Is the company

organized to exploit it easily?)

Figure 2-1: VRIO model

Value

Rareness

Imitability

Organization

Source: Jay Barney, 1992

Open APIs: Turning business strategy into reality

EBOOK

Figure 2-2: Alternative B2B2X scenarios, using smart TV as an example

XYZ Telco's role as the B2B2X

XYZ Telcos role is to enable the partners to
commercialize their offerings

XYZ Telco's role as the B2B2X

service provider
XYZ Telcos role is to enable, aggregate and
commercialize offerings

Scenario A
XYZ Telco Role

Partner

XYZ Telco as
operator /
service provider
+ other SPs
integrated
services

Content
service
provider
or distributor

Enduser

Scenario A
customer relations are managed end-to-end by DSPs

Scenario B
Partner

XYZ Telco

Content
service
provider
or distributor

XYZ Telco as
operator /
service provider
+ other SPs
integrated
services

Enduser

Scenario B
customer relations are managed end-to-end by CSP

Source: TM Forums B2B2X Partnering Step-by-Step Guide

Possible opportunities for assets

A key next step is to understand the
business opportunities that are open
to you by externalizing these assets,
noting the potential for a multitude of
different partnering, business and
contractual models.
To help demonstrate this, TM Forums
B2B2X Partnering Step-by-Step Guide
provides examples for how a service
provider could play a different role in
the value chain offering the same
service or core capability, but
monetizing that service in a different
way, through a different partnership
model, see Figure 2-2.

www.tmforum.org

In scenario A above the telco is

choosing to expose its services to
another partner potentially even a
competitor and enter into a revenuesharing model allowing the other
provider to maintain the contract and
relationship with the customer.
In scenario B the telco maintains the
contractual relationship with the end
customer and manages the end-toend process, including the partnering
arrangement with a content service
provider.

A key next step

is to understand
the business
opportunities
that are open to
you by
externalizing
these assets.

18824 OPEN API eBook V2.qxp_Layout 1 28/10/2016 14:46 Page 8

www.tmforum.org/open-apis

New markets and/or new

products
While some organizations feel
threatened by potential
disintermediation, others recognize the
opportunity to sell more services to
new markets through new partnership
and revenue-sharing models.
One way to evaluate how partnering
opportunities can help realize business
strategy is through an applied version of
Ansoffs Product and Market Expansion
Matrix, which allows organizations to
evaluate how these partnering
opportunities can be used to realize
business strategy (see graphic below).
Diversification is generally considered
the most difficult business expansion
strategy. Most organizations de-risk

The models in the scenarios outlined

above provide a clear mechanism for
partnering to reach different markets
through the bundling of services with
offerings from different companies and
industries by externalizing existing assets
through APIs. For more about access to
ready-made tools (such as proven
business processes) to make business
scenarios a reality, see page 14.
This opens new growth opportunities
for businesses, taking the so-called
sharing economy from something that
individuals do to something that
enterprises embrace as a genuine
growth and innovation opportunity.

Current market

New products

Sell current product to

existing customers
Market penetration

Sell new products to

existing customers
Product development

New market

Current products

long-term diversification strategy by

applying a market development or
product development strategy in the
shorter term.

Sell existing products

to new customers
Market development

Sell new products to

new customers
Diversification

Open APIs: Turning business strategy into reality

EBOOK

Adapt and get to market fast

These Ansoff strategies (except for
market penetration) demand
companies adapt quickly to seize the
opportunity and get to market fast
those that are sufficiently agile will be
able to address opportunities faster
and are highly likely to be the winners
in the longer term.

To appreciate the degree of flexibility

required, Figure 2-3 shows potential
future models that need to be
considered. You can see that the
number of possible business or
contractual models can rise
exponentially, depending on how
many parties are involved.

These Ansoff
strategies (except
for market
penetration)
demand companies
adapt quickly to
seize the
opportunity and
get to market fast.

Figure 2-3: Potential multi-faceted business models

Contract
Type TR211

Contract
Responsibility
aka TR211 Role

Scenario

Integrate

Sell To

I resell a product / service through a customer/partner who

repackages it in a global offer proposed to its cutomers. I
have no contractual relationship with their end custmoers.

Reseller Of

I resell the products / services of a partner to deliver their

product / service. I have the contractual relationship with
the end customer.

Sell Through

My product / service is distributed by a third party

unchanged, I may or may not maintain a contractual
relationship with the end customer.

Sold Through

I sell the products / services of a partner to deliver their

product / service. I may or may not have a contractual
relationship with the end customer.

Sell With

I partner with a third party to deliver an offer, each party

bringing a component of the global offer.

Distribute

Co-sell

The coupling may be weak (co-contracting / consortium) or

strong ( joint venture: a third party legal structure creation).
I maintain the relationship with the end customer and the
control of its product / service (either directly or through the
legal structure created) for the part of the offer it provides.
Based TR211 TR217 Concepts Mapping v1 12th March 2014

www.tmforum.org

www.tmforum.org/open-apis

CHAPTER 3: HOW DO YOU

IMPLEMENT THE API STRATEGY,
THEN KEEP IT ON TRACK?
The Forum's
approach is to
seek pragmatic
solutions based on
our members
real-world
implementation
experiences.

There are four critical elements involved in implementing an

open API strategy and keeping it on track:
1. Platform architecture
2. Open APIs
3. Streamline with Business Process and Information Frameworks
4. API Management System

1. Platform architecture
Platform architecture underpins the
platform economy. As with any
significant change-management
project, one of the first activities is to
create a vision of the future. A welldefined platform architecture is a
representation of how the business will
achieve the agility it needs to realize
that collective vision.
TM Forum is developing a Digital
Platform Reference Architecture
(DPRA), under strategic direction from
the Board of Directors Collaboration
Subcommittee, which includes
executives from several of the worlds
largest communications service
providers. It builds on the Forums
Frameworx suite of standards-based

10

tools and best practices, which

includes the B2B2X Partnering Guide,
the Digital Services Reference
Architecture (DSRA), the Digital
Ecosystem Reference Architecture
(DERA) and our Open APIs. The Forum
will be publishing a companion ebook
to this one on the DPRA shortly.
The Forum's approach is to seek
pragmatic solutions based on our
members real-world implementation
experiences. This includes
collaborating to develop common
information and data models, user
guides and APIs to help operators
expose their rich and vast networking
capabilities as platform providers. The
point is to work together on the
underlying processes that everyone
uses and then innovate on top.

Open APIs: Turning business strategy into reality

EBOOK

Pragmatic, real-life
contributions
For example, Vodafone is a key
contributor and leader in TM Forums
Open API project, and has contributed
its exemplar platform architecture to
that work. The architecture has a
modular structure and clearly shows
the critical role of APIs in enabling
business agility (see Figure 3-1).

A critical advantage of platforms and

APIs is that they provide an
evolutionary path from the current
telco operating model to the future
network-as-a-service model. The
collaborative work that TM Forum and
my fellow members have been
undertaking is shining a bright light on
this important path. Dr. Lester
Thomas, Chief Systems Architect,
Vodafone Group.

Figure 3-1: Vodafones platform architecture

Billing & Payment

APIs

Customer Service
APIs

Service
Managemnet APIs

Charging APIs

Service Inventory
APIs

Service Order
APIs

Service Catalogue
APIs

Resource
Managemnet APIs

Resource
Inventory APIs

Resource Order
APIs

Resource
Catalogue APIs

Marketing
APIs
Analytics
APIs
Enterprise
APIs
Common
APIs

Management

Customer Order
APIs

Resource

Partnering
APIs

Dr. Lester Thomas, Vodafone

Service

Customer Loyalty
APIs

Management

Customer
Management APIs

Management

Management

Product Catalogue
APIs

Customer

Business

A critical
advantage of
platforms and
APIs is that they
provide an
evolutionary path
from the current
telco operating
model to the
future networkas-a-service
model.

Source: Vodafone

BT adopts platforms
Similarly, BT has been working to
consolidate operational and business
support systems (OSS/BSS) during the
past six or seven years, reducing the
number from 4,500 to 1,798.
We started this work to transform
ourselves internally, but then a few
light bulbs went on and we realized it

www.tmforum.org

could be useful to our customers too,

who were trying to manage their [BT]
services through self-service portals,
says George Glass, Chief Systems
Architect, BT.
The plan is to minimize whole lifecycle
costs, reduce cycle time for launching
new capabilities and facilitate business
agility through platforms and APIs.

11

www.tmforum.org/open-apis

2. Open APIs
The successful platform organizations
we have looked at in this ebook all have
an API strategy at their core. TM
Forums Open APIs can provide the
foundation for APIs in all kinds of
business ecosystems, whether the
need is to expose core capabilities,
drive agility and operational
improvement, or simplify and speed
partnering. The Forums Open APIs
can save vast amounts of time and
enable interoperability across and
between ecosystems.

Free to
Use

Strong
Community

Copyleft

Available
Source
Code

The Open APIs suite is REST-based

and available to developers
everywhere to use, underpinned by a
strong community of TM Forum
experts from across the globe. They
enable rapid, repeatable and flexible
integration of diverse systems to make
it easier, faster and cheaper to create,
build and operate complex, innovative
services. These REST APIs can be used
by practically any programming
language and are also easy to test.
Importantly, the Forum takes the
copyleft approach (as opposed to
copyright), meaning our members are
encouraged to contribute extensions
and enhancements to the Open APIs
for the benefit of everyone who uses
them. By fostering this crowdsourcing
approach to development,
contributing extensions and
enhancements to the Forums APIs is
extremely popular.

12

Open APIs: Turning business strategy into reality

EBOOK

TM Forums suite of Open APIs can unlock a range of growth opportunities, including:

n Monetizing significant assets as

noted in Chapter 1 by Apigees Sam
Ramji, incumbents have terrific
assets which put them in a very
strong position, although they need
to overcome geographic
restrictions to be more attractive
to partners and developers open
APIs enable them to combine their
assets for services such as M2M,
IoT, enterprise mobile services and
many more.

n Dramatically improving business

and IT agility this was voted top
priority by network providers in the
Forums recent primary research,
and open APIs help by supporting
an open modular platform
architecture that hides the
underlying complexity to offer
capabilities to partners.

n Reducing the cost and complexity

of operations particularly
important for organizations with
subsidiaries in more than 20
countries and territories as they need
to reduce costs, simplify operations
and create harmony across
geographic regions, and deploy new
services and products globally.

operators can radically improve

and simplify the provisioning,
flexibility and scalability of
wholesale services. Working
together, using the same open
APIs, operators can collectively
scale to provide a global
connectivity ecosystem.

n Reducing integration cost, risk

and time for the entire supply
chain particularly when used in
conjunction with TM Forums
established Frameworx standards.

n Enabling a global ecosystem for

wholesale connectivity today
wholesale capacity is provided
inefficiently, involving many manual
processes, which are slow and
expensive. As communications
networks become increasingly
controlled by software through
technologies such as network
functions virtualization (NFV) and
software-defined networking
(SDN) by using the Open APIs,

+ {open}:apis+ +{open}:apis
{open}:platform
+ {open}:platform
Eight leading technology ecosystem participants DGIT, EnterpriseWeb, Ericsson, Huawei, IBM, BearingPoint/Infonova, Oracle
and UXP Systems have officially endorsed TM Forums suite of Open APIs for digital service management. These visionary
companies follow in the footsteps of nine of the worlds largest communications service providers Axiata, Bharti Airtel, BT,
China Mobile, China Unicom, NTT-Group, Orange, Telefnica and Vodafone who made a similar commitment in May 2016.

+ {open}:apis + {open}

www.tmforum.org

13

www.tmforum.org/open-apis

3. Streamlining business
processes, using a common
language

the Forums Collaboration

Community, along with the APIs.

The worlds best architecture and APIs

only perform to their full potential if
business processes are streamlined,
joined-up, efficient and easy to assemble
and reassemble as required. Just as
using open APIs makes deployment
quick and easy, using readily available
tools for business processes and
common definitions is a fast route to
realizing business strategy too.
The Business Process Framework is a
key part of TM Forums Frameworx
suite of best practices and standards,
which provides the blueprint for
effective, efficient business operations.
It enables you to assess and optimize
performance and integration. The
practical tools available in Frameworx
help improve end-to-end management
of services across complex, multipartner environments.
Frameworx has been widely adopted
and proven to significantly improve
agility in IT and operations (it is
commonplace for companies to save
millions in annual operational costs,
for example, as we have demonstrated
in many case studies published on
inform.tmforum.org), resulting in
increased margins, lower costs and
optimal customer experience.
Frameworx is created and evolved by
TM Forum members who participate in

A key element of consistent, replicable

and reusable business processes is
using a common language, and TM
Forums Information Framework
provides standard definitions for all
the information that flows through the
enterprise and between companies
and their business partners. This
means everyone talks about the same
things using the same terminology and
syntax, aiding consistency, avoiding
mismatches and speeding things up.
The best way to get the most out of
the Forums Open APIs is to use them
in conjunction with the Business
Process and Information Frameworks.
This is because the respective data
structure is provided with every new
Open API and aligned to the
Information Framework.
In this way, the Open APIs align directly
to expose an organizations asset or
the data structure. As the Framework
is widely adopted throughout the
communications industry, it also helps
ensure interoperability one of the key
objectives of the Open API program.
TM Forums Open API poster (which
can be downloaded free by everyone
who registers on our website) is helpful
when considering which APIs to
implement first and which to share
with the wider community.

Making it even easier and faster

To make Frameworx more easily accessible and simpler to use, the Forum has developed a Digital
Services Toolkit. As youd expect, the toolkit interacts with Frameworx via an API. The toolkit has
visualization, planning and operational tools, so users can easily and dynamically group Frameworx
elements into logical building blocks to create all kinds of digital services.
The wiki-style format enables users to notate individual pages with feedback and tips, to constantly improve the
toolkit and therefore Frameworxs usefulness and applicability.
The toolkit also has a Business Scenarios Template to enable users to choose the right items for their specific needs.
Most importantly, the process for creating a scenario is built-in so the user can progress through each key phase. For
more information about the Digital Services Toolkit, contact John Wilmes via jwilmes@tmforum.org

14

Open APIs: Turning business strategy into reality

EBOOK

4. API Management System

Amazon's and Jeff Bezos' success was
fundamentally underpinned by a
strong governance of externalizing
internal assets as digital assets and
recognizing the potential for
partnership with external customers as
well as internal ones. Organizations
need to build an API roadmap and
system to ensure excellent governance
is in place to reach right across even
the largest of organizations.
Centralized governance will ensure
that the right APIs are developed and
that they are used in a consistent
manner to further business goals.
To address these issues, technology
teams are investing in API
management to ensure a systematic
approach to the creation, governance
and deployment of APIs.
This will include ensuring that all APIs
follow industry standard principles
such as:
n Abstraction, to ensure that the
business capability is exposed
appropriately and complexity is
hidden
n Reusability, to ensure that APIs are
created with re-use in mind

n Discoverability, to ensure that

contractual requirements of the API
can be automatically interpreted
n Developer-friendly, to ensure that
the APIs can be consumed with
minimal effort or cost, that their
scope and purpose is clear, and
that source code is provided.
Beyond good governance and oversight
the next stage would be a full API
management capability, as offered by a
number of providers. These should be
evaluated to ensure the following
minimum requirements are catered to:

Centralized
governance will
ensure that the right
APIs are developed
and that they are
used in a consistent
manner to further
business goals.

n access control, without being a

barrier to use;
n analytics, to help guide future
development considerations
regarding popularity; and
n secure access and token
provisioning.
Note that in non-commercial platform
deployments, such as by government
agencies, the aim is often to increase
savings, streamline processes and
improve services to their users. In most
organizations commercial and
otherwise additional necessary
functions are likely to include marketing,
billing, advertising, usage monitoring
and more, beyond monetization.

Managing your APIs as a product

A good API management system should also enable you to manage your API as a product including catering to potential
future monetization models such as:

Customers pay a fixed fee for

using the platform

a transaction-based fee
is charged by the platform
provider for every transaction
carried out on it

a revenue-share model in which

customers pay a share of their
revenues to the platform
provider in exchange for using the
platform services

All three could be involved in a single transaction with different parties, as well as perhaps a subscription fee, such as
Amazons Prime for the end customer: Amazons sellers are the companys customers as well as the end buyer.

C
www.tmforum.org

15

www.tmforum.org/open-apis

CHAPTER 4: THE
INNOVATION CULTURE
It is ultimately
people and culture
that will make the
difference between
success and failure.

The key to a pragmatic, successful strategy is not to reinvent the wheel, but to leverage APIs and other proven
tools including TM Forums suite of business ecosystem
Open APIs. The ProgrammableWeb is also an excellent
source of over 15,000 APIs.
While the platform architecture, API strategy and API management systems are vital
to realizing a business strategy requiring a high degree of agility, it is ultimately people
and culture that will make the difference between success and failure. As business
guru Peter Drucker pointed out long ago, culture eats strategy for breakfast.
If an organization continues with business as usual, or reverts to the way things
used to be, it will kill innovation, including the potential for leveraging
infrastructure. The choices are, according to McKinsey, Grow fast or die slow.

STRATEGY
CULTURE

Source: Derived from Peter Drucker

16

Open APIs: Turning business strategy into reality

EBOOK

A culture of open innovation looks from

the outside in, not the other way round.
A much broader lens on innovation and
R&D can have a massive impact on
realizing strategic objectives.

Innovation at work
TM Forum has taken its own advice by
in recent years launching an
{open}:hack an integrated platform

to link ecosystems, to which we have

given teams of startup and enterprise
developers access. This has proven to
be a win-win formula, where both
hosting companies and hack
participants can work collaboratively
to create new applications and
platforms built upon services exposed
by the host companies.

{open}:innovation = {open}:data + {open}:apis + {open}:platform

This open innovation has been hugely
successful at sharing ideas, skills,
talent and technology across
collaborative teams to create new
solutions to real problems. The most
recent winning team, Firebot based in
Vancouver, Canada, created an
application to detect forest fires
quickly and provide accurate location
through crowdsourcing to reduce
response times. It could be applied to
other types of emergency response.
Click on the screen shots below to see
articles about our series of hackathons
held around the world to see the
diverse uses developers have come up
with for TM Forums open APIs almost
all of whom were new to the Forum.

www.tmforum.org

What to do right now

Remember Jeff Bezos edict that
everything is to be linked via API that
could be externalized for third-parties
use in future. Naturally, consumers of
certain services will be internal
customers, but all new services need to
be constructed in this agile way to
support the platform business strategy,
which is all about being able to seize new
opportunities, create new business
models and repurpose assets whether
infrastructure or data as needed.
Increasingly, organizations boundaries
will not be easy to recognize, as market
places exist at every level; consider a
bookseller who may compete against
Amazon by being a Marketplace seller
(and so an Amazon customer too), as
well as hosting its own online store on
Amazon Web.

Get started
straightaway by
joining TM Forums
Open API Project team
where you can help
build and crowdsource
the common APIs your
organization needs to
transform to a
platform-based
business.
This across-the-board discipline has to
start now and extend to legacy systems
and services too, which can still be
exposed in an intelligent and useful way
through APIs. Get started straightaway
by joining TM Forums Open API Project
team where you can help build and
crowdsource the common APIs your
organization needs to transform to a
platform-based business.
See the Ecosystem to Ecosystem
Catalyst which will be presented at TM
Forum Live in Asia, in December 2016.
For open innovation opportunities,
where you can bring your developer
and product teams to mash up new
innovative services for your company,
see TM Forums Open Hack series.

17

www.tmforum.org/open-apis

APPENDIX 1: TM FORUM
OPEN API ROADMAP
Similar to the copyleft approach, all we ask is that you engage with our community
share your experiences, amendments for improvements and extensions.
Open API Roadmap
Trouble Ticket API
Customer Management API
Product Catalog Management API
Product Inventory Management API
Product Inventory Management API
Billing Management API
Party Management API
SLA Management API
Usage Management API
Activation and Configuration API
Performance Management API
Privacy API
Onboarding API
Agreement API
Service Qualification API
Quote API
Address API
Appointment API
Service Quality Management API
Test Management API
Change Management API
Resource Order API
Service Ordering API
Resource Catalog API
Resource Inventory API
Entity Provisioning API
Service Catalog API
Service Inventory API
Digital Service Management API
Location API
Loyalty API
Shopping Cart API

18

Available

3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3

Early Adopter
Beta APIs

Update
Planned

Coming
Soon

3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3

Open APIs: Turning business strategy into reality

www.tmforum.org

Interested in participating in the Open API program?

Contact Joann O'Brien,
Vice President, Open APIs & Ecosystems
jobrien@tmforum.org