APIs
What trends are you seeing with network APIs in the global wholesale market?
Carsten Bruns: Use of APIs in general has been growing for many years, while network APIs were born with the arrival of 5G – providing more opportunities for telcos than ever before. The real new thing is that telcos, which traditionally protect their networks as a key asset, are opening them up.
Some of the main trends are in fraud prevention and quality-of-service, whereby dedicated bandwidth, latency and throughput are provided on a temporary basis. There’s also a push for standardisation through means like global alliance CAMARA and the GSMA Open Gateway initiative. That’s super-important in making it much easier for developers to use network APIs.
Where does the global wholesale industry currently stand with network APIs?
I think as usual in the early stages of developments, there are many unknowns about the future. But from a product-lifecycle perspective, we’re out of the exploration phase and in the rising part of the growth curve.
Several communication APIs standardised within the GSMA have been deployed by telecommunication operators in the last couple of years and we have started to see more visible adoption in developed regions.
We have several sales channels for network APIs. In my opinion, no telco has the means to address all these developers alone. That means we won’t end up cannibalising each other’s services, but will instead be working alongside hyperscalers and aggregators on the global stage like Vonage, which could also onboard telco APIs into their own portfolios.
What’s new about the way Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier is selling network APIs within its recently launched Digital Services Portal?
The new thing is not so much about the APIs themselves, but that they can be easily accessed via our all-in-one Global Carrier Digital Services Portal. Our vision here is to provide more of everything digital – more convenience, more choices and more opportunities – for our customers. We have a host of services available, including our Numbers Universe, Telekom Edge Cloud, mobile-identity APIs and our workflow automation tool, with more in the pipeline.
In several wholesale product areas, such as Numbers Universe, we want to make sure that easy-to-use digital portals and API interfaces for quick integration into systems are also available for our customer base.
How much of a change does putting these network APIs and related infrastructure in place create for the wholesale industry?
It gives customers much greater access to telco assets. I’d say it’s a little like the arrival of Web 2.0, when internet developments accelerated dramatically because everybody could contribute to services that were not thinkable before.
Take use cases such as driving an ambulance through a crowded city so it always takes the shortest path. I don’t think that would be possible to maximise without access to telco assets, meaning APIs will boost digitalisation and softwarisation globally. The potential for innovation is also much bigger if you open the network to everybody.
Where are Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier and the industry in terms of network APIs?
We’re out of the proof-of-concept and into the ‘proof-is-in-the-pudding’ phase, with industry demand growing every year. We’re well-equipped as a global carrier and as part of Deutsche Telekom to take a leading role, aided by initiatives such as our new portal.
We’ve also played a leading part in CAMARA, which has been gaining new members all the time. Meanwhile, Deutsche Telekom has created a dedicated business unit called MACE [Magenta API Capability Exposure] to consolidate the network API business.
CPaaS
How do you define communications platform-as-a-service [CPaaS] at Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier?
Nicholas Nikrouyan: In our industry, a lot of people still think of CPaaS as being synonymous with SMS, which is not the case from my point of view. For me, it can be anything the customer requires from a telco-asset perspective to engage with users, including API voice and video, and things like chatbot services.
Something that’s becoming big is quality-on-demand in areas like gaming, telemedicine and mission-critical environments, especially as 5G comes in. The network infrastructure of telcos will continue to be a growing part of the CPaaS ecosystem too.
How do you see CPaaS services evolving in the future?
Carrier initiatives to provide easy access to network APIs and projects such as CAMARA will lead to an environment in which the customer can decide, based on their particular requirements, exactly how they want to access the API ecosystem in a standardised way. A hospital may, for instance, need access to the telco assets of Deutsche Telekom in Germany and two hours later, those of Orange in France or Vodafone in the UK, and so forth.
When it comes to Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier, we have the capillarity, reach and access to networks worldwide to create an easy way for customers to get global reach through a single point of contact. This is a critical part of ensuring that, for instance, when a SIM card in a car crosses the border from one country into another, all the services you can access in the home country you can seamlessly access in others.
What’s the main trigger for carriers to now adopt wider CPaaS services beyond messaging?
Digitalisation is now taking place in almost every corner of the world and carriers have developed part of their activities around softwarisation. Carriers have taken some time to shift their mindset, as they’re not software companies and don’t have that in their original DNA, but CPaaS is a software-driven activity. It’s therefore about having the right employee profiles on board to provide those services.
Carriers have reached the point of understanding that they need to become part of the value chain, with CPaaS creating a good space for them to come in and make more money. It also creates more stickiness among customers, which now want more one-stop-shop services rather than going through multiple vendors to get what they need on a global basis.
How is Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier positioned to compete on CPaaS services?
Just like with everything else we do in wholesale, we will both compete and cooperate. Where we see our difference is that we want to be quicker than everybody else in developing our platforms. For instance, I think our mobile digital identity offering is more developed than those of other operators, having engaged in this in Germany and Hungary for a while and looking to expand it elsewhere.
As a highly reputable mobile operator globally, we’re also recognised for quality. We really try to listen to customers and understand their pain points.
Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier is very active from an innovation perspective too, trying to be ahead of the game in terms of what’s coming next and how we can engage in it faster than others. In this environment, the windows are often narrow, but once we see an opening we take it.
What does the Digital Services Portal mean for customers when it comes to CPaaS services?
The portal will make working with Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier much easier and more convenient for customers, which will be able to source everything via a single access point.
In a wholesale CPaaS model under which wholesale customers resell our CPaaS services to domestic or regional enterprises, they need to offer ready-made digital interfaces – so that’s exactly what we have developed and put in the hands of our customers. From an organisational perspective, our efforts position us as a fast-moving, digitalised company.
Read Deutsche Telekom's special report, titled Wholesale Redefined, by clicking here.
