Canadian telecom operator Telus snared a thumbs up from industry trade group TM Forum tied to the carrier’s use and support of TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA). The move highlights the growing carrier support for open APIs up and down their operating stack.

Telus is the fourth operator, and the first in North America, to gain the “running on ODA” check, joining past awardees Axiata, Jio and Vodafone Group. Those operators gained that status late last year, which means they are using a network architecture that follows TM Forum’s ODA guidelines.

TM Forum launched the ODA program in early 2018. TM Forum CEO Nik Willetts told SDxCentral that the program is tasked with allowing the ecosystem to be able to re-use particular building blocks for constructing next-generation operating support and business support systems (OSS/BSS).

These are based on open API principles that make it easier for operators and their vendor partners to share critical information to help build and support new functions and services.

“ODA is a pretty ambitious journey that we're, with our members, driving the industry on to get to really reusable software that the industry needs in terms of the building blocks, interoperability, abilities to partner [and] abilities to really transform the velocity of telecom operations overall,” Willetts said of the program. “What we've introduced over the last six or seven months has been a holistic assessment that looks at all the things we believe need to be in place to really get the most out of an open digital architecture. And a lot of that is not just about the architecture itself. It covers the skills you need in place, the working practices, the business processes [and] the capabilities in terms of cloud awareness that you need to really build out and get the most out of Open Digital Architecture. And to do that we've set quite a high bar.”

Willetts said that the assessment process includes having TM Forum’s CTO walk through an operator’s actual use and support of ODA.

“Not only do we interview a number of the team to understand exactly how it's working today and their approach to different aspects that the assessment covers, but also then we look for evidence in certain areas,” Willetts said. “We have our own data in terms of use of our APIs, we look for certain pieces of evidence from the operator that we're looking at as well.”

TM Forum also teased that it was assessing ODA work with four other organizations, with three additional organizations eligible to begin the assessment process.

Telus CIO Hesham Fahmy said the carrier began looking at a way to better utilize APIs in constructing its internal systems in early 2018, hooking onto the TM Forum ODA program in late 2019. He said the move was needed as Telus realized it was often having to re-build support systems every time it launched a new service.

“As Telus has been expanding in multiple verticals outside of just core communications, we got into smart home, smart home security, connected home, and even in house we quickly started realizing that we're rebuilding the same thing multiple times,” Fahmy explained. “As we tried to build better customer experiences, better journeys, we were finding it exponentially harder to add new value to customers because we're having to do it three times, four times, five times as we go into new verticals. It quickly dawned upon us that there's a lot of commonality in these domains, and we should be reusing and gaining leverage from the stuff we built in the past or what we're building going forward.”

As an example, Telus noted it recently launched a new offering across six of its go-to-market channels simultaneously at one-third of the usual cost and reduced time-to-market by one-third.

Fahmy cited recent ODA work with a number of vendors like Google, Netcracker, Amdocs and Matrixx Software. He also noted the work highlighted a different way of working for the operator.

“It's more than just the APIs and the modularity, but it's in the ways of working, so how we approach our architecture and DevOps, how we approach design, how we approach development, how we truly take this, reuse, plug-and-play mindset further, and then it's really helped us get some great velocity and innovate and iterate very quickly,” Fahmy said.

Hasan Jafri, VP of platform engineering and common services at Telus, in a statement said the operator has “trained and upskilled 170 team members” to deploy and support the ODA-based architecture, “and our goal is to ensure ODA runs through the fabric of our entire company.”

The telecom space has increased its focus on APIs to unlock value from their rapidly opening ecosystem.

Industry trade group GSMA, for instance, partnered with a handful of operators and vendors to launch the Open Gateway initiative. That initiative is targeted at standardizing network APIs that the telecom industry can offer to the developer and application community to simplify revenue-generating interactions.

Open Gateway uses common, northbound service APIs to expose a mobile operator's network capabilities “within a consistent, interoperable and federated framework.” It’s launching with eight APIs, including support for SIM swap, quality on demand, device status, number verification, edge site selection and routing, two-factor authentication and carrier billing.

The work also builds on the open source Camara project GSMA launched last year with the Linux Foundation.

Willetts noted that TM Forum is part of the Camara Project and is driving its decade-plus of work with open APIs into that project’s focus on its product APIs.

“That's another area where we're very passionate about, to really have those APIs take off at scale,” Willetts said. “They're going to be super easy to use. We can't as an industry come with complex network terminology that only we understand. So we're going to make it extremely easy to use, but in order to make it easy you've also got to hide a lot of the underlying complexity and open this architecture. Open APIs are one of the enablers of that and we're finding that through some of the proof-of-concept projects we're running around GSMA Open Gateway and Camara do just that.”