TM Forum is bringing different stakeholders from across industries to work together and build key partnerships to create the APIs and connections. The reference architecture and APIs we are co-creating are critical enablers of our API program and open innovation approach for building innovative new digital services in a number of key areas, including IoT applications, smart cities, mobile banking and more.

Laurent Leboucher, Vice President of APIs & Ecosystems, Orange

TM Forum REST based APIs are technology agnostic and can be used in any digital service scenario, including B2B value fabrics, Internet of Things, Smart Health, Smart Grid, Big Data, NFV, Next Generation OSS/BSS and much more.

Open API Manifesto:

To date 18 of the world’s leading technology ecosystem participants and service providers have signed the Open API Manifesto publicly demonstrating their endorsement of the TM Forum’s suite of Open APIs.

The nine CSPs that adopted the Forum’s Open APIs in May 2016 have agreed to position them as a preferred requirement in their IT RFPs from January 2017 onwards. The group of 9 leading technology partners commit to using Forum Open APIs in relevant product applications and to continue to provide feedback and extensions to the APIs ensuring continuous growth of the community in support of these industry agreed APIs. 

Read the official announcement here.

Read the Manifesto here.

Read the official announcement from May 2016 here.

TM Forum’s suite of Open APIs can unlock a range of growth opportunities, including:

1. Dramatically improving business & IT agility: Open APIs enable a modular platform architecture, allowing companies to abstract underlying complexity and establish a set of platform capabilities which can be used to radically reduce time-to-market for new services and the cost of creating and operating of these new services. 
2. Reducing the cost and complexity of operations: Organizations need to reduce cost, simplify operations and create harmony across geographic regions and on a global basis for deployment of new group-wide or region-wide product offerings. 
3. Enabling a Global Wholesale Connectivity Ecosystem: Today, the wholesale ecosystem is hugely inefficient with largely manual processes which are not viable in a world of NFV and SDN. By implementing Open APIs for IT, operators can radically improve and simplify provisioning, flexibility and scalability of wholesale services. This enables operators to work together to deliver network services at global scale which can compete effectively in today’s market.  
4. Reducing integration cost, risk and time for the entire supply chain: With service providers under increasing pressure to improve IT efficiency and overall agility, the costs and risks associated with point integrations need to be reduced. TM Forum Open APIs in combination with established Frameworx standards provide a pragmatic way to dramatically cut the time and risk associated with business transformation projects, ongoing maintenance and future change requests.  
5. Opening a global platform for telco-based innovation: Communications Service Providers have many significant and monetizable capabilities, but the geographic restrictions for many of these services limits their ability to attract app developers – be they start-up developers or enterprise developers – with global ambitions. By exposing a set of telco capabilities through common APIs, alliances between operators and developer communities at scale are feasible in a much easier way. Typical applications already exist in M2M, IoT, enterprise mobile services, etc.  

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