The TM Forum announced that AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Salesforce and China Telecom have signed on in support of its Open APIs.
Those companies showed their support by signing the TM Forum's Open API Manifesto, which commits them to using the TM Forum's APIs in their products and service offerings as well as in their request-for-proposal (RFP) processes.
“Open APIs and open source software are at the heart of our network transformation, and we're thrilled at the broader ecosystem that's adopting the same approach,” said AT&T's Chris Rice, senior vice president, network cloud and infrastructure, in a statement. “TM Forum has played a critical role in nurturing this ecosystem, and we're pleased to support their Open API initiative.”
The new members also agreed to take part in the TM Forum’s Collaboration program to continuously innovate and update the suite of Open APIs. Those APIs are in use by more than 7,000 software developers In over 1,200 companies worldwide
The TM Forum has been building support for its REST-based Open API ecosystem over the past three years. Other companies requiring the Open APIs include Axiata, Bharti Airtel, BT, China Mobile, China Unicom, Ericsson, Globe, Huawei, IBM, MyRepublic, NTT-Group, Oracle, Orange, Telefonica and Vodafone, among others.
Deutsche Telekom has been using the TM Forum’s Open APIs to transform its back-end systems with a single mobile application, according to DT's Peter Leukert, global chief information Officer.
“DTs rapid deployment of APIs is a core competency that all operators can benefit from,” said Leukert, in a prepared statement. “With this new approach we were able to significantly reduce time-to-market for the IT delivery of complex programs and bring significant business value in a very short time period.”
RELATED: TM Forum, Linux collaborate on open source architectures, open APIs
Last year, the TM Forum and The Linux Foundation announced a formal partnership in an effort the two organizations said was aimed at enabling service providers to more rapidly adopt new open source project technologies while driving a broader ecosystem of open source and applications.