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The Rise and Rise of Telecom APIs

The Emerging On Demand Enterprise Service Opportunity

O R A C L E W H I T E P A P E R | J U N E 2 0 1 5

1 | THE RISE AND RISE OF TELECOM APIS

Table of Contents

Introduction: Why Telecom APIs are Cool Again 2

The History of Telecom APIs 5

The Uber Revolution and the Rise of On-Demand Services 7

Case Studies 9

Telus 9

Orange in Africa 11

Dialog in Sri Lanka 12

Korea Telecom 13

Telecom Italia 14

Vodafone Hutchison Australia 14

Processes and Go To Market 15

Telecom API Processes 15

Governance 16

Out of the box Communication Services and Enablers 17

Vertical Services 17

Go to Market 18

The Industry’s Kodak Moment 19


Introduction: Why Telecom APIs are Cool Again

“The telecommunications industry has reached a ‘Kodak Moment’. If we do not act, in 5 years the industry could be

all but gone. We must build ecosystems not ego-systems, Telcos have missed many business opportunities by not

being willing to experiment in their markets with small innovative companies from around the world. Telcos’ assets

such as billing, identity, channel to market, location, voice and messaging still have value, but time is running out.”

KHAIRIL ABDULLAH

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER AT AXIATA DIGITA I

AXIATA GROUP

Adding telecommunications capabilities to applications, services and business processes is powerful;

and it’s all done through telecom APIs. Uber and Airbnb are using telecom APIs to remove human

latency from old business processes and in doing so creating $50B businesses. Uber is everyone’s

private driver. From an iOS or Android device, customers can request a private town car pickup. Uber

keeps customers updated about the status of their ride in real-time with SMS. Airbnb enables private

residents and commercial properties to rent out extra space to travelers looking for a hotel alternative.

Airbnb use SMS to enable hosts to be notified of and confirm a traveller’s request.

Application to person (A2P) SMS traffic is close to 1.8 trillion messages per year and growing at 6-10%

thanks to M ’s unique reach, responsiveness and real-time nature. Some start-up businesses

fulfilling these needs through telecom APIs handle over 300 million A2P SMS per month and have

achieved valuations over $1 billion.

The phone number is quite a useful identity; most internet-based communication services like

WhatsApp use the telephone number identity today because it also provides a handy multi-factor

authentication capability. Put simply, you possess something (e.g. a mobile phone #) and you know

something (e.g. a password). We’ve seen much activity in the past year on using the phone number in

multi-factor authentication as businesses start to understand the century’s old username/password

paradigm is broken with high profile celebrity hacking cases. Enterprises are increasingly using

traditional voice and messaging services through APIs to confirm a user’s identity. It’s a market

growing at 22% per year, with a total market size of likely over $10 billion by 2019, source Alan Quayle

Business and Service Development.


We are witnessing a ground swell of innovations come from many types of developers as they learn

about what telecom APIs mean to them through global events like TADHack (Telecom Application

Developer Hackathon), where 500 developers took part in the global event in 2014, for 2015 that

number could double. Hacks are being generated that mash-up enterprise and telecom APIs. For

example:

» Co-browsing through online house listings using content APIs from the company’s website and

WebRTC APIs;

» Adding mobile payments to content services using mobile payment APIs;

» Creating real-time quizzes using SMS and IVR (Interactive Voice Response) APIs;

» Raising money for charities using communications with video telephony APIs and mobile payments

APIs;

» Online training with face detection to ensure the student is paying attention using WebRTC APIs;

and

» Embedding communications and collaboration in the many services and processes we use everyday

using calling and conferencing APIs.

In the past couple of years we’ve seen telecommunication capabilities become more broadly

integrated beyond the phone call, thanks in part to the leadership of companies like Uber, Airbnb and

other on demand service providers. TADHack is supported by many telcos, included Axiata group,

Dialog, Portugal Telecom, Telstra, Truphone and US Cellular, who take the innovations generated to

their local markets.

The role of Telecom APIs extends beyond service exposure to third parties; its use within the telco’s

existing business and with its existing partners has proven over the past 5 years to be where telcos

have achieved the most business success. Telecom Italia has over 2 billion API transactions per

month, most of which are revenue generating for example from simple premium SMS content services

to in-car info-mobility services such as navigation and local information. Many other Telcos have

achieved similar results. This pragmatic approach to Telecom APIs is shown in Figure 1. The external

category in Figure 1 encompasses groups such as existing customers that can use the APIs, such as

an SMS appointment reminder service or a click to call service; also businesses such as local system

integrators using the APIs on their client’s behalf; and the plethora of small companies wanting to work

with telcos as mentioned in Khairil’s quote. It’s a category of users where trust is not as high as internal

or with existing business partners, the partners category shown in Figure 1, but has to date not been

fully exploited.

http://tadhack.com/


Figure 1. Today’s Pragmatic Approach to Telecom APIs

Internal uses of APIs have many mundane use cases such as re-using subscriber profile and

authorization information across the many portals and services a telco offers. It may not have the

glamor of external innovation, however, it has improved the customer experience, lowered costs of

operations, enabled Telcos to understand the importance of APIs to their business, and built the

organizational learning to better approach external parties.

“Telecom APIs mean we get to market in days not months for new services, we’ve increased our number of partners

and services by over a factor of ten since their introduction. Resulting in significant cost avoidance and building a

robust revenue portfolio.”

CYNTHIA WONG

MANAGER

TELUS DIGITAL

Telcos today have many aspects of their business exposed through APIs. Some of the services /

capabilities provided through Telecom APIs include:

» Traditional bread and butter communications (voice and messaging) plus associated value added

services such as conferencing;

» Subscriber (customer) information and management;

» Account information and management;

» Authentication and authorization;

» Device capabilities;

» Pricing and plans;

» Order management; and

» TV related service and management.


The History of Telecom APIs

“The Telecom Industry’s obsession with standards really did a number on Telecom APIs. Instead of copying the web

model of publish and evolve guided by the users’ needs. A group of telecom standards engineers with little

experience in APIs created a series of specifications that delayed action for years and once implemented were out

of date. The end result was the failure of APIs to engage external partners. Fortunately, API aggregators, and others

plugged the gap by following the web model, and some built businesses worth over $1B.”

ALAN QUAYLE

INDEPENDENT AND FOUNDER TADHACK / TADSUMMIT

An API (Application Programming Interface) is a way for two independent software systems to exchange

information, put simply: talk to each other. An API is an interface specification between software components that

could be running on the same OS (Operating System), or within the same enterprise data center, or across the

Internet.

Web APIs are generally used between software running on different servers across either the public Internet or a

private network. They are named Web APIs because they are based on ubiquitous web technologies, so are easy to

use, making them accessible to tens of millions of developers. An API is usually a HTTP (Hyper-Text Transfer

Protocol) request, here is a simple example: “http://www.telco.com/api.php?action=telco_service(A#,B#)”.

In the telecoms industry they are referred to as network APIs, however, a better term is telecom APIs because a

telco’s assets are much broader than just its network assets, they also include IT assets as shown in Figure 1. Web

APIs are in common use from traditional businesses like the New York Times to web-based service providers like

Saleforce.com and Google. Figure 2 shows the number of public APIs has now exceeded 13,000. Once upon a time

businesses questioned the value of having a website and today every business has one, the same is becoming true

for APIs. Some of their motivations in using APIs are:

» Make or save money;

» Build brand;

» Move to the cloud; and

» Go anywhere (mobilization).

APIs reduce business friction by making it easy for software systems to work together, for example a payment

service, e.g. PayPal, can be offered through an API so an ecommerce checkout, e.g. Amazon.com, can offer PayPal

as a payment method. This example highlights a critical point, APIs are simply containers by which services or data

are exposed and then consumed by another software system. The money is in the service or data, APIs are simply

improving efficiency so new business opportunities can be created.

“The money is not ‘in the API,’ it’s in the service delivered by the API. APIs are simply delivering services more

efficiently, which opens up new business opportunities.”

JOSE VALLES

VP PARTNER PRODUCTS

TELEFONICA DIGITAL

APIs have become a fundamental component of the web, how businesses work together, and how groups within an

enterprise work together. An API is NOT just about web-service providers engaging developers, it’s about

organizations like the US Air Force running their internal operations more efficiently as well as working with suppliers


more effectively. An API avoids expensive and time consuming SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) or EDI

(Electronic Data Interchange) integration; simply publish an API, provide the documentation and with a little work by

a developer the service or data offered through the API is integrated into another system.

Figure 2. The Exponential Rise of Public APIs, source programmableweb.com

Telecom APIs have been discussed since the mid-1990s, with the Parlay group being formed in 1998 and ended in

2007. The standardization of air interfaces and network-network interfaces is fundamental to the success of

telecommunication networks. A mobile phone can work in most countries around the world and call almost anyone

in the world. That is an achievement the Internet has yet to match, given the lower penetration of Internet access

around the world and the lack of a common communications application. However, this success has resulted in the

telecoms industry creating too many standards where really the market should decide, and then if appropriate let a

de-facto standard emerge if it makes business sense. The effort to integrate to an API is minuscule compared to the

effort associated with the LTE air interface; there simply was no benefit to API standardization. It’s important to note

no other industry has standardized APIs before they were proven in the market

Standardization of telecom APIs delayed the industry’s adoption. It miss-focused the industry on external APIs; and

miss-focused deployments on simply publishing standards compliant APIs with little thought to the users’ needs,

processes, purpose and people required to make service innovation happen.

The gap created by the above situation was been filled by start-ups that aggregated telecom services and exposed

them through easy to use Web APIs. They focused on developers’ needs with simple well-documented APIs that

work across a whole country or region by aggregating calling and messaging from many telcos, and all backed by

world-class support. In the US, SMS remains the communication mechanism with the greatest reach across the US

population at over 90%, and the greatest response rate. So even through person-to-person SMS is in decline in

many countries due IP-based messaging platforms like WhatsApp; application-to-person / business-to-person SMS

traffic continues to grow with Juniper Research predicting a market size of $60 billion by 2018. Thanks in part to the

work of these companies.

While the start-ups were focused on working with third parties, many telcos focused their efforts on using APIs

internally and with existing partners, e.g. MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator). These two use cases account for

the majority of telecom API traffic today. With internal API traffic making up between 50-80%, and partner traffic the

rest. Working with external entities is still relevant; AT&T continues to invest heavily in its developer program. And as

voice and messaging continue to commoditize service innovation will become ever more important to a telco’s future

success, as stated by Khairil Abdullah, hief ecutive fficer at A iata igital ervices , Axiata Group, in the

introductory quote to this whitepaper.


The Uber Revolution and the Rise of On-Demand Services

“We must establish a new collaboration layer with web-centric interfaces to enable friction-free interoperability &

partnerships.”

AMOS MANASSEH

AXIATA DIGITAL SERVICES

PRACTICE LEAD | GROUP API ECOSYSTEM

Steve Schlafman from RRE Ventures published in 2014 an insightful weblog on the uberification of the services

economy, see Figure 3. He defined ODMS (On-Demand Mobile Services) as delivering a “closed loop” e perience

by collapsing the value chain including discovery, order, payment, fulfillment (offline but within owned network) and

confirmation. In the pre-mobile era when we needed a plumber we had to search yellow pages or Google, select a

plumber based on very little knowledge other than they were local, call the plumber, wait to finally talk with the

plumber after playing voicemail tag, schedule a convenient time, hope the plumber arrives on time, and then pay

with a credit card or cash. Thankfully, a new array of services removes most of that friction and uncertainty we

experienced.

The ‘old’ process included significant human latency. The concept of communication enabled business processes is

not new; we’ve been talking about it for several decades. The significant change that has happened in the past two

years is entrepreneurs discovered the recipe to remove much of that latency, thanks in part to telecom APIs. That is

the web-backend of these services uses messaging and calling so people communicate as fast and as appropriately

as possible. In the Airbnb example we mentioned using SMS to enable the host to respond as fast as possible to the

traveller’s request. Making the experience almost like real-time booking even through there is a significant human

component to the process.

There has been an explosion of start-ups following the success of Uber and Airbnb, as shown in Figure 3.

Apartments can be cleaned by Handy or Homejoy; groceries bought and delivered by Instacart; clothes washed by

Washio and flowers delivered by BloomThat. Fancy Hands provides personal assistants who can book trips or

negotiate with the cable company. TaskRabbit will send somebody out to pick up a last-minute gift and Shyp will gift-

wrap and deliver it. SpoonRocket will deliver a restaurant-quality meal to the door within ten minutes.

Figure 3. The Uberification of the Services Economy


Headlines go to Uber’s $50B valuation, with revenue of $1B in 2014. But Uberification is not limited to just a few

innovative start-ups. All businesses can benefit from on-demand mobile services, whether it’s in their e ternal or

internal processes. Think of it as embedding communications everywhere, because the network has become

programmable. All those businesses are customers of telcos, and on-demand services are a natural extension of

traditional communication services delivered through Telecom APIs. But its’ much more than just calling and

messaging, other telco assets such as payment, identity, profile, security, location, and conferencing apply in this

emerging opportunity.

Many telcos have achieved success in providing location information associated with point of sale credit card

transactions. When a credit card purchase is made, the location of the mobile phone of the credit card holder is

checked to provide additional information on potentially fraudulent transactions. It’s a simple check as part of the

authorization process and has been shown to reduce card declines by up to 30 percent. Taking this credit-check

idea a little further, in many emerging (fast) markets telcos have more insight into their customers’ credit worthiness

than any other in-country agency. There is much potential for telcos in the rise of on demand services, particularly in

emerging markets.

Almost every business process starts with an identity check, we are overloaded with passwords, and hence 2-factor

authentication process becomes a front-end to almost every business process in confirming identity. Hence why

we’ve seen recent acquisitions (e.g. Twilio buying Authy) and product announcements (e.g. Nexmo announcing its

verify service at TADSummit in 2014.)

And just to make a final point that what we’re describing in the rise of on demand services is relevant across all

types of business. For many small neighborhood businesses in the US, they are simply not online, but do good

business through people walking in and over the phone / fax. Yep, fax is not dead for many small businesses; my

local take-out place does more lunchtime orders by fax than by phone as all the local businesses place their orders

by fax. The delivery.com process is built to reflect the reality of such small businesses. A customer places their

order online at delivery.com. The order is faxed to the merchant by delivery.com, and then the merchant is auto-

dialed to confirm the order is OK and that it will be ready or delivered on time using the confirmation code on the fax,

and hence the credit card payment can be made.

Also SMS plays a role, delivery.com confirm orders not only by the fixed phone line in the store, but also by SMS to

the store owner’s mobile phone. They maintain a ‘connection’ between the customer and the merchant, just like

Airbnb maintains a connection between the traveller and host. Say an order is going to be delayed by 10 minutes,

the merchant lets delivery.com know by SMS and they let the customer know. Telecom APIs mash-up the virtual

world of the web with the physical world.

“Telecoms is complex and expensive if you do it yourself, we use a telecom API in order to keep our focus on our

customers and merchants. Once we decided to move from our own technology to using a telecom API, it took less

than one week, and most of that time was testing.”

PIERRE DAVIDOFF

VP TECHNOLOGY

DELIVERY.COM


Case Studies

“An API strategy has become a must…in terms of speed to market with new products, maximizing business

development, and product development opportunities.”

STEVE KURTZ

VP BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

U A T A

Presented here are just a few case studies to highlight the business successes Telcos are achieving with telecom

APIs. Some of the business drivers Oracle has seen for telecom APIs include:

» Attracting new users and partners, enabling IP-based communication services

» An Asian telecom customer turned an IP-based service from a threat to an opportunity by providing charged-

for services and they are now actively seeking additional IP-based service partnerships

» Enable new revenue streams

» An Indian telecom customer is making more than $7M per month through messaging API exposure

» Enable collaborations and strengthen partnerships

» A South American telecom customer provides services via partners with a ROI (Return on Investment) of

less than 6 months

» Utilize underused competitive assets – turn internal services into products

» API management enabled an Australian telecom customer to move from flat mobile revenues to introducing

several new services to partners, 3rd parties and their own customers

» Opex (Operational Expenditure) reduction

» A southern European telecom customer reduced Opex by 50% for their MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network

Operator) management, onboarding a new MVNO now takes a few days compared to 6+ months

Telus

Telus is a Canadian telecommunications company that provides a range of telecommunications products and

services including Internet access, voice, entertainment, healthcare, video, and satellite television. At the start of

2015 they have over 8 million mobile customers, over 3 million fixed line customers, over 1.5 million Internet

customers and 1 million TV customers.

Telus wanted to improve the time it took and the costs associated with new services. Generally it was taking 9

months and costing over $300k for integration fees to launch new services such as a Kid Finder and Music App.

New services are critical for both customer retention and maintaining a robust revenue portfolio. Telus embark on an

API project, which was focused on internal development and working with partners.

The outcome of the project was a 10 times increase in the number of new services, a 10 times increase in the

number of new partners, and new services were being launch over 6 times faster. It was now taking days not

months to launch new services. This resulted in a rapid increase in the use of the API platform as shown in Figure 4.

An important aspect of Figure 4 is the evolution phases of the project, in particular the phase on operational

excellence in 2013-2015, with a focus on reliability, process, governance and best practices.


Figure 4. Telus API Transaction volume over time, source Telus 2014

To back up the point made in the earlier section on the time wasted on API standardization; Telus uses over 75

APIs, shown in Figure 5. They cover a broad range of network, service and IT assets. As Telus has close to 1 million

TV customers it also has a broad range of TV APIs. A telco’s API management platform must have the flexibility to

support hundreds of diverse APIs, as well as be able to integrate with a complex legacy infrastructure situation.

Figure 5. Telus APIs, source Telus 2014


To wrap up this case study we’ll review some of the guidance Telus provides in making your API project a success.

It all comes down to the 3 factors of people, process and technology, which we’ll discuss later in this whitepaper.

» Culture is Key

» An API for everything and everything as an API”; API as part of your NA!

» Top to bottom organizational support for an API strategy will move the needle from organic growth to full-

scale adoption

» Focus on Reliability and Resiliency

» Invest in availability, performance, capacity, SLA and understand how you need to scale

» Maintaining an high availability platform will allow you to support carrier grade applications

» APIs are Products

» Drive distributed ownership of API domain knowledge, lifecycle, management, and operations

» Consider sales channel, support, strategy, per API

» Understand which API patterns you support well; have smart people around to figure out everything else

» Control the customer experience

» Retain control over the customer experience by maintaining privacy and preventing bill shock, especially for

3rd party services

» Always protect your own brand; governance is critical

» Listen to your partners

» Not all APIs consumed by 3rd parties will be chargeable

» Our most important Partners are internal

Orange in Africa

Developing (fast) markets are different to mature (slow) markets when it comes to engaging third party developers.

Telcos have a chance to remain relevant in local converged mobile/web services. We’re seeing a number of telcos

being successful by acting in their markets as a partner rather than a gatekeeper. Orange in Africa is achieving solid

results with its API program in engaging third parties (the external categories shown in Figure 1).

Orange in Africa, the Middle East and Asia accounts for 38% of Orange Group customers. Countries include

ietnam, Niger, People’s emocratic epublic of ongo, Madagascar, Tunisia, Botswana, Uganda, and many

more. It’s where the growth of Orange Group resides. Orange has used the APIs listed below to engage businesses

from large corporations and non-governmental organizations to individual entrepreneurs:

» SMS A2P API: Evolution of Bulk SMS into a self-service, multi-country product allowing developers to easily send

SMS to all Orange countries

» Carrier Billing API: Evolution of Premium SMS into a Digital payment solution, directly connected to Prepaid and

Postpaid Orange accounts

» USSD Shop API: Multi-country USSD shop , open to partner services on a dedicated short code in a Kiosk model,

and accessible through APIs

» Orange Money API: Evolution of Orange Money into a Digital payment solution open to a selection of partners

Some of the hacks generated at Orange events on those APIs include:

» mLouma is a startup based in Senegal, who can now provide SMS and USSD access to an existing web platform,

giving real-time agriculture market data to producers and buyers.

» NG System developed in days a series of USSD services for Orange Mali customers, such as Pharmacy locator,

Lottery, Women Health info, etc.

» Mediasoft is an IT company who built many USSD services like Surveys, Football Quiz, Health data collect and

who operates SMS mobile banking services.


» Echelon Fast Travel is a mobile ticketing service in Cameroon, which used APIs to allow easy payment and large

availability across SMS and USSD.

Orange has taken an open collaborative approach, working with local entrepreneurs, businesses and agencies to

make a difference in the countries Orange operates in. It is actively involved in local incubators, hackathons, and

many other initiatives to make a difference both in the lives of people in Africa. But also in the financial success of

those businesses and entrepreneurs using Orange APIs that is the key to engaging others as success breeds

success.

Dialog in Sri Lanka

Dialog in Sri Lanka has taken a similar approach to Orange in Africa, and given its earlier start has achieved

significant financial success through engaging local entrepreneurs and business with IdeaMart, as shown in Figure

6. IdeaMart offer a range of APIs for people with coding skills across location, USSD, SMS, profile, calling,

payments, IVR (Interactive Voice Response), subscription management and identity. But critically they go a step

further than APIs, they offer patterns, simply web based forms, for people without coding skills to use common

services build on those APIs such as alerts, voting, contact requests, click-to-call, and call-me services. This enables

IdeaMart to engage all ialog’s customers with its programmable network.

Figure 6. Dialog IdeaMart Success, source Dialog 2014

IdeaMart was started by a team of just 2 people, which today has grown to only 6 people, even through the

revenues of IdeaMart are now challenging those of big value added services such as caller ring-back tone. There

are principally three factors behind ialog’s impressive success with IdeaMart:

» Simplicity

» Self-service

» Segment target market into developers and non-developers

» One-click agreements

» Extremely low barriers

» Free hosting

» Quick settlement, within 10 days

» Out of the box advertising

» Community engagement, see Figure 7, people are critical to creating and propagating success

» Business and technology engagement

» Link to angel investor communities, several businesses have been founded from IdeaMart success


Figure 7. Engaging the local market, source Dialog 2014

Korea Telecom

Oracle customer Korea Telecom is a South Korean integrated wired and wireless service provider with 16M mobile

customers and the largest portion of the South Korean local telephone and high-speed Internet business.

Some of the challenges they faced were:

» Multiple user profile and authentication systems;

» Long integration and deployment cycles for new products spanning multiple networks;

» High operational costs for new service creation and deployment; and

» Limited partner access to telecom APIs due to integration complexity.

Korea Telecom deployed the Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper and the Oracle Communications

Converged Application Server to provide an exposure platform enabling unified customer and subscription

management.

“Our organization seeks recognition as a global communications leader with IT offerings based on cloud computing

and convergent communications services. We selected Oracle Communications’ portfolio because the organization

has a sound track record in the global market and productized solutions specifically designed to meet the needs of

telecommunications companies seeking to offer superior service.”

JAE LEE

SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF BUSINESS AND INFORMATION SYSTEM TRANSFORMATION (BIT) CENTER

KOREA TELECOM

The results from this deployment included:

» Reduced costs for internal and 3rd party access and utilization of authentication and profile services by

consolidating to one access point;

» Shorten time to market for new internal and external apps utilizing profile and authentication services across

multiple KT networks (fixed and mobile)

» Enable future addition of services including SMS, MMS, and location


Telecom Italia

Telecom Italia, an Oracle customer, was faced with the challenge of strong competition in partnering with MVNOs

(Mobile Virtual Network Operators), and third party web-based services. It had relatively high costs for 3rd party on

boarding and access management; and associated high costs in customization and maintenance. Plus new

regulatory constraints for exposure of its network capabilities to third parties and competitors, which meant it

required both more openness and control in the exposure of its assets.

With the Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper API Exposure Platform, see Figure 8, Telecom Italia:

» Reduced Opex (hardware, software, human capital) on messaging infrastructure by 50%

» Simplified onboarding of partners

» Provided network protection and control by enforcing various policy and service level agreements for partners

» Increased monetization of existing network assets

Figure 8. Telecom Italia API Platform

Telecom Italia has validated the need to place an emphasis on partners and internal development based on their

experience of only about 1% API usage by long-tail and over 49% each for partners and internal. The internal usage

has resulted in a 50% opex savings, simplified partner on-boarding. This case study has become a reference around

the world on the successful implementation of telecom APIs.

Vodafone Hutchison Australia

Vodafone Hutchison Australia employed the Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper API Exposure platform to

unify access across a number of properties that were recently merged into the VHA (Vodafone Hutchison Australia)

family.

The Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper was deployed on the Amazon Cloud. API exposure included

payment (including in-app charging), messaging, user profile, location and custom Vodafone APIs.

The outcomes from the implementation included:

» Generated new revenues as a secure third party developer service exposure platform

» Reduced process complexity and time-to-market through simplified third party charging for content and services


» Enabled new services to be easily exposed including location, subscriber profile and messaging

One example service provides cricket scores and offers upgrades through in-app charging to enable live cricket

videos. The app, shown in Figure 9, keeps users up to date with Cricket games with:

» Live scores with ball by ball commentary

» Live Cricket TV

» Video clips, reports, results, etc.

» Provides in-application billing for premium features

» Live scores & video

Figure 9. Cricket App using in-app payments for premium content and services

Processes and Go To Market

“The success of any endeavor is dependent on 3 factors: people, processes and technology. As an industry we’ve

focused a little too much on the technology, in the hope it can make the other 2 factors less relevant. Unfortunately

that is not the case. However, the processes for telecom APIs can reuse many off-the shelf proven IT tools.”

ALAN QUAYLE


Telecom API Processes

racle’s pedigree in enterprise IT enables it to provide the Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper with a full

suite of API management capabilities including:

» Built-in API management and governance

» Multiple service facades including support for REST, SOAP, SOA and native interfaces


» Comprehensive policy and Service Level Agreement support

» API firewall and security

» Extensive pre-built communication services

» Partner on-boarding and management

» Easily customizable and extensible

Governance

This is the backbone of any API management platform, with the functions shown in Figure 10. racle’s offer

includes extensive integration with telecom systems and many out of the box capabilities.

Figure 10. Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper Governance

» Creating & Publish: wizard-based API creation tool that allows users to create a web service to expose underlying

services in minutes. To expedite the development of telecommunications applications, an array of

telecommunications services and API’s are include as out-of-the box capabilities, allowing web service

developers to develop sophisticated telecommunications applications without having to be an expert in

telecommunications protocols.

» Policy & SLA: The Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper includes a powerful and responsive policy

enforcement mechanism that uses service level agreements (SLAs) to regulate service provider and application

access to particular communication service functionality down to the level of supported operations and

parameters. It also supports a range of quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees that you can modulate by time of day

/ day of week, rates, and quotas. You can add more rules to limit access. SLA management and maintenance can

be simplified by organizing service provider and application accounts into groups. You can also create custom

SLA versions to enhance the set of broadly comprehensive SLAs.

» Security: Proven API firewall covering XML firewall, DDOS, JSON targeted attack, and brute force attacks.

Complete WS security standards support across authentication, signing, encryption, and security tokens.

Complete OAuth 2 support. Policy and SLAs can also be employed to provide black listing and throttle as a

security measure.

» Onboard & Manage Partners: Partner Manager to automate on boarding of new partners, manage the API

lifecycle, and establish policies for fine grain control of app, API, and partner access and utilization. An Application

Service Provider Manager to provide self care for account management, discovery of APIs, and register new

applications. Dedicated portals with workflow support. Web Services interface for integration and extension.

» Monitoring & Analytics: Understand API usage. View results in Partner or Partner Manager Portal. Oracle

Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition can be used to create new analytics reports.


» Metering & Charging: Meter and charge for API. Integrate with the Online Charging Systems via Diameter Ro/Rf.

Web services and Java Message Service (SMS) integration with billing servers. Out of the box integration with the

Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management charging system.

» Versioning & Retirement: Multiple versions of APIs may operate in parallel with appropriate restrictions placed on

older version to promote adoption of the latest version of the API. In addition to managing the lifecycle state of the

API. The Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper manages the overall workflow surrounding the API

lifecycle ensuring that appropriate notifications are provided to stakeholders.

Out of the box Communication Services and Enablers

Another unique feature of the Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper is the extensive list of proven adaptors,

see Figure 11. This is not the typical enterprise-grade API Management platform that assumes only REST interfaces

are available. The Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper integrates into the complex legacy infrastructure of

a telco and provides the single point of API management across all the telco’s assets. No competitor can match

such a productized solution.

Figure 11. Out of the Box Adaptors

Vertical Services

Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper global deployments over the past decade bring a wealth of vertical

services built by Oracle and its many partners, see Figure 12.

» Telecom API Exposure: Extensive pre-built communication services with network service enablers

» IMS Gateway: Exposing IMS capabilities as web services such as call control, presence, charging, address list

management, and quality of service

» VoWifi Entitlements Server: provides the entitlements across a user’s mobile devices such as tablets,

smartphones, and PCs, to validate which entitlements they have in the network to enable such features as VoWifi

calling and receiving calls on the same network telephone number.

» Network Policy as a Service (NPaaS): Allowing internal and partner services to control bandwidth and charging to

ensure services are delivered with appropriate QoS in order to maintain a superior quality of experience.

» Trusted Identity as a Service: trusted “identity brokers,” can bridge the gap of trust and security between end

users and web/app transactions to build sustainable revenue streams by authenticating identity credentials with

relying parties.


» Internet of Things Communications and Management: Provide common APIs for device provisioning and

interaction, secure and selected access, protect against misbehaving applications, manage partner and

application onboarding; and monitor, log and analyze usage.

» Contact Center App Enablement: creating a better experience for the customer and a reduction in operating

expenses for the call center. With features such as call reconnect when calls are dropped; courtesy call back to

ensure affected customers are called back in a timely manner; app-driven control of voice messaging for various

purposes (brokers, safety officials, etc.), and app-driven session recording from business applications.

Figure 12. Vertical Services

Go to Market

Go to Market remains the most challenging area for operators, not because it’s difficult, rather telcos’ NA was

formed when customers came to them for telecom services, rather than going to the customer with new

propositions. In many cases telcos wish to remain some form of “platform provider”, simply sitting back and let the

money roll-in as others create value on top. Unfortunately the Internet has flattened most of those opportunities to

the point that there are only a few global plays left. The bottom-line is a direct customer relationship is vital to the

future of any business; it’s all about the services.

It’s important to avoid black and white thinking. Operators are innovating; they are launching new services,

extending existing services, and building a more robust revenue portfolio. However, it’s the rate of innovation that is

the concern, it needs to be closer to that of the web, that is where the real competition resides.

“Telecom APIs mean we get to market in days not months for new services, we’ve increased our number of

partners and services by over a factor of ten since their introduction. Resulting in significant cost avoidance and

building a robust revenue portfolio.”

CYNTHIA WONG

MANAGER

TELUS DIGITAL

The existing organization has limits; it has been designed to deliver telecommunication services very efficiently.

Unfortunately many of the new opportunities are at the intersection of the web and telecoms, for example the on

demand services opportunities discussed earlier. And a telco is focused on the operational needs to make next

quarter’s numbers, as that is how the financial community judges the CEO. The existing business cannot transform,

the financial community and the CEO will not let it.


To innovate in the new emerging opportunities requires an entity separate from the existing business. An incubator

of business and technical people, see Figure 13, who can spin up an service instance before morning coffee and

work their contacts to get the service into the hands of a relevant group of users, listen to their feedback, and craft

the service to work in their local market. Its how start-ups work. There is no magic here, it requires people to roll-up

their sleeves and get out there and “be willing to experiment in their markets with small innovative companies from

around the world” as Khairil stated.

“Many CEOs ask me how can they make their organizations more innovative. My response is, ‘you can not.’ As a

CEO next quarter’s numbers defines your world. Innovation will always be put on hold to meet operational needs.

Innovation must be taken outside of the business as usual organization – they will kill innovation on sight with

business cases, process reviews, billing and CRM integration.”

ALAN QUAYLE


Figure 13. Managing Innovation

Telcos’ must e pose their assets and services through APIs across all aspects of their business. Quoting from the

Telus case study, “An API for everything and everything as an API”; API as part of your NA!” An API platform must

support a broad range of business scenarios across internal service development, working with existing partners,

and supporting fast paced external innovation. The Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper is designed to

support this diversity with the governance, policies, SLAs, security, onboarding, metering and monitoring to meet

those needs.

The Industry’s Kodak Moment

“The telecommunications industry has reached a ‘Kodak Moment’. If we do not act, in 5 years the industry could be

all but gone. We must build ecosystems not ego-systems, Telcos have missed many business opportunities by not

being willing to experiment in their markets with small innovative companies from around the world. Telcos’ assets

such as billing, identity, channel to market, location, voice and messaging still have value, but time is running out.”

KHAIRIL ABDULLAH

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER AT AXIATA DIGITA I

AXIATA GROUP


We open and close this whitepaper with the defining quote from Khairil Abdullah, CEO at Axiata Digital Services. We

clearly understand the problem facing our business, just like Kodak did in the rise of the digital camera. Kodak

developed a digital camera in 1975, the first of its kind, the product was dropped for fear it would threaten Kodak's

photographic film business. Through the 1990s they even had a strategy on how to manage the transition to digital,

however, business as usual would not let them execute on that strategy. The financial market’s e pectations and

hence the ’s focus is ne t quarter’s numbers. Others such as Canon, Nikon, Leica, and Fuji did manage the

transition, though their situations were slightly different, so we can avoid Kodak’s fate.

The transition to exposing assets through APIs has enabled telcos to become more responsive, to lower operational

costs, and within the constraints of the existing business deliver more value to its customers, in particular business

customers and partners. We have reviewed a number of defining case studies including Telus, Orange, Dialog,

Korea Telecom, Telecom Italia, and Vodafone Hutchison Australia.

Uberification is not limited to just a few innovative start-ups. All businesses can benefit from on-demand mobile

services, whether it’s in their external or internal processes. Think of it as embedding communications everywhere,

because the network has become programmable. All those businesses are customers of telcos, and on-demand

services are a natural extension of traditional communication services delivered through Telecom APIs, and as we

saw with the Dialog case study simple web forms to access services enabled by those APIs. The Dialog case study

shows, its’ much more than just calling and messaging, other telco assets such as payment, identity, profile,

security, location, and conferencing apply in this emerging opportunity.

We are entering a phase where the mashing-up of telecom and enterprise APIs is opening up many new business

opportunities, many of which we’ve only just scratched the surface of, for example in the use of location information

in credit card transactions. The key is to realize our existing business is both our greatest strength and greatest

weakness. We must look to empowering an entrepreneurial group of business and technology people within an

incubator to “experiment in their markets with small innovative companies from around the world using telcos’ assets

such as billing, identity, channel to market, location, voice and messaging while they still retain value.” The existing

business will only focus on incremental innovations around the existing lines of business.

The Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper is built to support this broad range of business scenarios across

internal service development, working with existing partners, and supporting fast paced external innovation.

Uniquely, the Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper integrates into the complex legacy infrastructure of a

telco to provide the single point of API management across all the telco’s assets, with many out of the box APIs. No

competitor can match such a productized solution.

Oracle Corporation, World Headquarters

500 Oracle Parkway

Redwood Shores, CA 94065, USA

Worldwide Inquiries

Phone: +1.650.506.7000

Fax: +1.650.506.7200

Copyright © 2015, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is provided for information purposes only, and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document, and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Intel and Intel Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. AMD, Opteron, the AMD logo, and the AMD Opteron logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group.v06102015 The Rise and Rise of Telecom APIs June 2015

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