AT&T, Amartus Team for MEF Testing Service

The number of providers who are adopting MEF LSO APIs to standardize and automate negotiation of services with customer and suppliers has increased significantly.

The APIs currently cover serviceability, quoting and ordering of services and are already being used in production with many providers. AT&T was one of the first providers to adopt LSO APIs with more than a dozen suppliers already in production, increasing to around twenty suppliers by the end of this year. In the past each supplier had to work directly from the standards specification documents and API definitions to develop their implementation.

This often led to differences in interpretations and basic errors resulting in prolonged and problematic interoperability testing. As the number of suppliers who implement the LSO APIs increases the need for an efficient, scalable means to onboard and test interoperability is apparent.

To address these challenges, Amartus worked in close cooperation with AT&T and other MEF Members to define the MEF LSO API Onboarding and Interoperability Testing Service ('MEF OIT Service'). The outcome of that work led to Amartus' appointment as the MEF Authorized Test and Certification partner for the service and subsequent launch of the service in Oct ‘21. The MEF OIT Service implements configurable buyer and seller software emulators ‘Digital Siblings’ that are compliant with the LSO Sonata API standards. These emulators were developed by Amartus using its nBrace™ Inter-provider Automation software, they offer a common interpretation of the standards that was independently verified by MEF. The aim is for all providers to test their implementations against these emulators to achieve a high degree of compliance and compatability with partner implementations prior to engaging in direct interoperability testing. This leads to reduced implementation and partner interoperability test cycle times and the ability to onboard and test with multiple partners in parallel.

“The MEF OIT service allows us to accelerate supplier adoption by testing with more suppliers in parallel. AT&T expects its suppliers to use the MEF OIT service prior to engaging in interoperability testing to significantly shorten the testing and onboarding life-cycle for our suppliers and AT&T." said John Nolan, VP Global Connections and Alliance Management, AT&T

"Amartus was uniquely positioned to offer the MEF OIT service. The knowledge and expertise we accrued as a contributor to development of the standard coupled with or real-world experience gained by applying our nBrace™ Inter-provider Automation software to implement MEF LSO APIs for providers enabled us to offer the service" said Michael Kearns Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Amartus. "Several AT&T suppliers are actively using the service to test their implementations; some have already used it to get into production with AT&T sooner than could have been expected.”

Amartus is working closely with AT&T and its suppliers to fine-tune the service so that the time and effort for onboarding and interoperability testing is minimised.