The Camara project was an active participant at this week’s Open Source Summit North America event in Denver, attempting to yet again attract developer interest to the project’s telecom API cause and reversing what has admittedly been a challenging endeavor.

Markus Kümmerle, who’s on the Camara project outreach committee and also program manager for Deutsche Telekom’s API Exposure efforts, explained to SDxCentral in an interview from the event that this outreach work is about garnering trust from a skeptical developer community.

“We have to go to developers,” Kümmerle said. “We are now really going to the developers, because we have still to educate the market.”

Kümmerle noted that this education is focused on getting that developer community excited to work with the telecommunications market, which has historically been a challenge.

“Yes, we have the image that telco is complex, that telco is difficult, that telco doesn’t work, but with the work we have done I think we can change it and we have to tell the people, ‘look, we do it differently. We have learned from our failures in the past. We do it differently. Here’s our offer. Please try it. Please check it out,” Kümmerle said.

The Camara project’s work is based around getting developers to write APIs that can tap into the vast wealth of information operators have on their networks. These APIs can then be used by commercial-facing operations to construct and sell new, revenue-generating applications.

IDC predicts the worldwide telecom and network API market will be generating north of $6 billion in revenues per year by 2028. This includes the market surging at a 57.1% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from the approximately $700 million in revenues generated last year to more than $6 billion in 2028.

Kümmerle said operators initially failed in these attempts due to their focus on selling “technical APIs,” but that work through the Camara project is focused on providing developers with information that they can actually use for these new applications. This involves the need to both simplify access to this information for developers and more work with aggregators that can provide easier access to this information.

Analysts have repeatedly questioned the ability for telecom operators to participate and reap rewards from this ecosystem.

“From a technology stack perspective, from a cultural perspective at the telcos, from a talent and operation model perspective, institutionalizing and monetizing network APIs is really hard for telcos. We’ve seen this. They’re struggling to get the developer community to pitch in,” Chris Antlitz, principal analyst for telecom at TBR Insights, explained during a post-MWC Barcelona 2024 podcast last year.

Antlitz did note that there has been some progress toward these efforts, “but if you look at the big picture and where they need to go in terms of scaling, in terms of building business models around these, in terms of institutionalizing and changing their ways of working to make network APIs and enablement platform, we’re not seeing that. There’s what is being said and there’s what’s being done.”

Telecom API efforts

The Camara project was launched by the telecom-focused GSMA trade organization and in partnership with the Linux Foundation in 2022. That project was focused on centralizing the creation and portion of telecom APIs across the carrier ecosystem.

That work has since been built on through different commercial-facing platforms. One is the GSMA Open Gateway initiative that was unveiled in early 2023. 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 operators’ 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 Open Gateway initiative launched with support from more than 20 companies, including global operator heavyweights AT&T, Bharti Airtel, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, Verizon, and Vodafone. It also included positive commentary from most of the cloud ecosystem's largest players, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft.

More recently, Ericsson and Google led the creation of Aduna, which is a commercial project focused on monetizing these telecom APIs. Those efforts have so far garnered dozens of the world’s largest telecom operators and, more importantly, hyperscalers.

Analysts have noted that these cloud giants are crucial cogs in any API effort.

“Hyperscalers, to me, have a huge untapped opportunity by just by the sheer volume of the cloud developer community and the reach within all these different verticals where the high-value use cases might come from,” John Byrne, research VP for IDC’s Communications Service Provider Operations and Monetization practice, said during a webinar on the topic last year.

Aduna did recently score Microsoft as a partner, but cloud heavyweight Amazon Web Services (AWS) remains outside of that group’s bubble.

Chivas Nambiar, GM for AWS’s telco business unit, during a press briefing last year explained that these telecom-led API initiatives “are good, but they’re not sufficient.”

“You have to have additional components,” Nambiar said. “You have to be able to take a workload or a use case, and that use case needs to run on some sort of compute, it needs access to storage and databases and machine learning capabilities at the edge. And all of those need to work together in a way that a developer can use it to create the solution and test it and see what works and what scales.”

Nambiar said that independent software vendors (ISVs) are currently best positioned as an API intermediary between network operators and end users.

“That is where I suspect longer term most of the revenue is going to come from: ISVs consuming the telco APIs to build differentiated experiences,” Nambiar said. “But it’s very early in the game. This year you have probably seen from the plethora of announcements happening right now. This is where that discussion is really starting to heat up, and I’m excited about in two years what the marketplace actually looks like.”

Nokia is also a notable absentee from the Aduna efforts. That vendor has been working on its own network API strategy over the past several years in an attempt to help operators better monetize their network investments and make sure Nokia is a source of those monetization efforts.

Those efforts culminated in late 2023 with the launch of Nokia’s Network as Code platform that includes a software development kit (SDK), network API documentation, a sandbox for creating software code, code snippets that can be included in applications, and developer analytics to track usage. Like many others, Nokia’s efforts are based on Open Gateway and Camara, but the vendor added its own flavor on top of those efforts.

“In order to win in this particular market with developers, the Camara initiative and Open Gateway are necessary but not sufficient,” Shkumbin Hamiti, GM of Nokia’s network monetization platform business unit, explained during a press briefing at that time. “You need to have the developer experience offered to them, and that is what is really important for the telco industry to get right; but Camara will just make it very simple to aggregate across the operators. And then even for the operators that want to open up these to the developers, the developers would have a good understanding of those APIs.”

A Nokia spokesperson in a statement to SDxCentral noted that the new Ericsson effort “validates the meshed API ecosystem approach that Nokia has been driving over the past year since we launched the Network as Code platform. This ecosystem is guided by Camara and GSMA [Open Gateway Initiative] standards and is not exclusive to any alliance. All operators are working with multiple aggregator partners to reach developer audiences and that remains the path that Nokia will continue to lead and follow.”

Focus on monetization

Kümmerle, for his part, did add that there might still be more work to do, but “we are willing to learn and to fix things.”

“It's important now that we make first revenues for all the telcos,” Kümmerle said. “We’ve worked now for three years, that’s fast for the telco industry, but people now get nervous and some are not convinced. We can’t do better than by showing them there are still convinced, and you can't better convince them than by showing monetization.”