TM Forum API Partner Program Accelerates API Economy with GSMA, CAMARA, and MEF Collaborations

TM Forum announced the first results of its API Partner Program with two collaborations focused on driving standardization and harmonization of next generation APIs to reduce complexity, increase agility and create new revenue opportunities through faster monetization of networks.

Firstly, as part of the GSMA’s Open Gateway initiative, the GSMA and TM Forum are collaborating on a complete set of APIs to monetize network capabilities using TM Forum’s widely adopted Open API standards and the Linux Foundation's CAMARA APIs.

Service APIs developed by CAMARA expose network capabilities such as Quality on Demand to enterprise developers. Through the partnership, Operate APIs, developed by TM Forum members enable CAMARAs APIs to be managed as products for developers to consume and pay for network services. This enables Communications Service Providers (CSPs) to offer network services more efficiently, while exposing their networks to the global developer community. Ultimately through the TM Forum and GSMA partnership, a global marketplace for network monetization of APIs will be established.

This goal is becoming reality at DTW24 - Ignite, with TM Forum member ClearX, through its subsidiary company Glide, announcing the beta release of a commercial marketplace for GSMA Open Gateway APIs on the Google Cloud Platform, providing developers with access to CSP capabilities globally. The beta, which is the first to leverage TM Forum and CAMARA standards in a live, multi-country environment, demonstrates true collaboration between partners across the telco and tech ecosystem.

Secondly, TM Forum and MEF are collaborating to harmonize MEF’s APIs with TM Forum's Gen5 Open API standards to streamline automation within the MEF Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) domain, including Carrier Ethernet and IP services, SD-WAN and E2E network slicing, SASE, SSE and ZTNA delivered across a global partner ecosystem.

Through the project, MEF's Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) automation APIs will become fully conformant with TM Forum's Gen5 Open API standards. Harmonization with TM Forum Gen5 APIs will enable fully automated end-to-end management and operations of MEF NaaS services, reducing costs and speeding time to market.

Initial work on the first APIs has established a clear technical path to delivering a full API suite for automation within MEF's NaaS domain by the end of 2025.

“The collaborations with GSMA, CAMARA and MEF underscore the transformative potential of industry-wide standardization of

APIs,” said George Glass, CTO of TM Forum, “Together, we are paving the way for faster service delivery, improved operational efficiency, and new monetization opportunities. These collaborations are crucial in supporting TM Forum’s vision of a future where industry-wide alignment on common specifications provides the interoperability and innovation required to re-ignite growth.”

Alex Sinclair, Chief Technology Officer, GSMA: “We have begun to build a unified ecosystem that can unlock the full potential of 5G networks. The opportunity presented by GSMA Open Gateway, and other network API initiatives, is significant, but we need to act now and build momentum with the demand side of the equation. We can achieve this through close collaboration with each other, but the real focus should be on engaging and exciting developer communities so they can build innovative new use cases and the services of tomorrow.” 

"MEF’s widely adopted LSO APIs are crucial to meeting the needs of enterprises who expect the same agility in network services as they experience with cloud,” said Pascal Menezes, CTO, MEF. “By aligning with the TM Forum on common APIs and data models, we’re giving service providers ease, agility and responsiveness they need to automate the full lifecycle delivery of complex multi-provider NaaS services to businesses in the cloud era." 

At DTW24 – Ignite, TM Forum is also announcing the release of 10+ asynchronous (Async) APIs that will be available in the new Open API Directory. Async APIs support event driven architectures and are being used as part of the TM Forum & Jio Async API Hackathon Challenge at the summit.

To date, 85 organizations have certified 1,145 TM Forum Open APIs which have been downloaded more than 875,000 times by over 48,000 registered developers.

Source: TM Forum media announcement