How Open APIs are Enabling Innovation for Telecoms

Over the last few years digital enablement organizations such as Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, etc. have made a huge mark on the global business map and these organizations have seen phenomenal success by being disruptive and using a platform business model.

This has enabled them to do business with a lot of innovation and this has helped them to compete successfully with well-established players across different verticals, and they have also been able to explore and capture new business opportunities in uncharted territories.

The fast emergence and rapid development of application programming interfaces (APIs) has driven this success for so many digital enablement companies such as these determined this global success. Such powerapps development services enable service providers to reach out to a broader consumer base through faster internal processes, external service provision and rapid innovation. This API driven business ecosystem concept allows services to be innovated and used in situations never imagined before.

APIs driving growth

One of the biggest feature of APIs is that they should allow consumers easy and specific access to services and help organizations to scale according to their business capabilities. In such business scenario, systems not only integrate the services using APIs, but also specify and receive very specific services.

This drives unprecedented flexibility to these businesses and hence provides them with greater level of advantage over their traditional counterparts in the market. APIs driven businesses have the potential to work in new unplanned scenarios, for unknown consumers. But, this is possible only if the API is easily adaptable to accommodate business changes quickly.

Business Reinvent Models

As we move towards embracing 5G, increasingly than ever before, communication services are playing a critical role in most industry verticals as well as in cross-vertical situations. Hence the APIs provisioning of these services are quite important for creation of next-generation platform solutions.

The first-generation platform solutions and services offered by Amazon, Uber etc that we see today provide matchmaking services offered between consumers and producers within a specific domain such as retail, transport and accommodation. But moving forward, when we derive second generation platform solutions - the real potential will come from leveraging services from different verticals, such as healthcare leveraging telcos.

And with the help of such combination of verticals - new innovative solutions can emerge, which reflect more complex human needs such as those seen in telehealth. And hence, services need to be intertwined using APIs from dissimilar domains to ensure seamless customer experience for businesses as well as customers.

API aim for profit and agility

Recently enough, communication service providers (CSPs) have started enabling this ecosystem of APIs, and have started exposing APIs related to customer interface, and in some cases, driving communication services with the help of innovation in APIs.

But it is important to note that CSPs are yet to see exponential growth of communication services. And in order to to cross this barrier, CSPs need to become platform enablers and become businesses of such business models in other industries. They need to achieve seamless ecosystem updates to drive profitability of their business.

Ideally, their solution should consider the overall ecosystem, and the API implementations should address specific consumer and producer needs.

Their platform offering should bring efficiency in the overall system by carrying out precise matchmaking, and APIs should support the exchange of necessary information in such cases.

And additionally, the APIs must expose core telecom services of CSPs in a way that is easy to integrate for their business. It should not need telecom experts to understand how to use the APIs – it should be easy to implement and easy to roll out. Innovative and intelligent software-driven API management can achieve this for the CSPs.

And lastly, the intended solution should ensure seamless end customer experience, even while crossing over vertical domains of businesses. The solution should also be designed keeping in mind the future scaling of operations. This can ensure that growth opportunities are not hampered due to platform limitation.