CENX is enhancing its industry-wide work on APIs by signing TM Forum’s Open API Manifesto. The company will work with Telefonica, Vodafone, Ericsson and 24 other global service providers and technology ecosystem participants to develop industry standards for open application programming interface (API) integration.
TM Forum’s goal for the project is to enable highly automated, zero-touch operations and management of complex services end-to-end across digital ecosystems, delivering higher quality services at lower costs. The initiative provides an avenue for companies with vested SDN and NFV interests to collaborate in simplifying the overhead associated with systems integration.
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Andrew McDonald, chief product officer at CENX, said in a release that the creation of standard APIs would ease software integration pain for service providers and enterprises.
“Right now, there is no set standard for APIs, which can be problematic when it comes to software integration,” McDonald said. “Industry standards for APIs would circumvent the pain points that can be associated with the integration of two or more systems.”
By having standard APIs, McDonald added that monitoring software would be able to be seamlessly integrated with a newly turned up service immediately, “so that the service can be effectively monitored the instant deployment is complete.”
Signing the Manifesto is just one of several activities TM Forum is taking to develop API standards.
Earlier this month, TM Forum launched its online Open API lab “platform” to accelerate service providers and suppliers’ ability to develop new applications and services. Developed through a partnership with IBM and Neural Technology, the platform is hosted on IBM Cloud to enable faster deployment of TM Forum’s Open APIs, as well as provide access to many open-source technologies, such as Node.js, OAuth2 and Connect ID.
Developing APIs is not just a conceptual idea for TM Forum. TM Forum’s collaborative work has produced a suite of over 50 open APIs which have been used by over 670 companies and downloaded more than 22,000 times.