- Itential’s CTO says it’s easy to help enterprises with their network automation because their vendors have public APIs
- Conversely, he said it’s more difficult to help telcos with their network automation because their vendors refuse to publish their APIs
- But analyst Roy Chua said there are reasons why telco vendors don’t publish their APIs
Chris Wade, the co-founder and CTO of Itential, says the telco industry is being held back on the network automation and orchestration front because key software vendors refuse to make their application programming interfaces (APIs) public. Specifically, he called out the big operation support system (OSS) vendors as some of the biggest offenders.
But before we delve into Wade’s complaints about the state of network APIs, let’s rewind for a little background on network automation.
Back when software defined networking and network functions virtualization (NFV) were all the rage, people strove to create automation software that would apply across many network domains. However, things didn’t turn out that way.
Over the last decade, network automation has become specific for different domains, which include data centers, SD-WAN, firewalls, core networks, access networks, RAN, telco edge and enterprise services.
In response, Itential adapted to become the orchestrator of automation software for these different domains. You could say that Itential “automates the automation.” But Wade prefers the word “orchestration,” saying, “We’re really excellent at orchestrating automation across those domains.”
APIs
Itential works its orchestration magic by tapping into APIs from the many domains and their different vendors. And it doesn’t just work with telcos. About half of its business comes from enterprises.
Wade said it’s a lot easier to work in the enterprise space, and he expressed frustration with some telco vendors — specifically the OSS vendors — because they refuse to publish their APIs. He said enterprises follow the model of the big hyperscalers such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS), which make their APIs public. And these public APIs make it easy for others to innovate on top of the cloud. Similarly, he said enterprise vendors such as Salesforce and ServiceNow make their APIs public, and it’s easy to work with them.
Conversely, network software vendors in the telco space won’t publish their APIs. This has caused the standards group TM Forum to step in and try to coordinate APIs.
Wade said, “I’ve spent my fair time at the TM Forum. What the TM Forum did was build a standard set of APIs so vendors could work together. Why do we have to do this? If we would just publish our APIs publicly, we would foster innovation around creating network services for telcos.”
In the meantime, Itential supports all the TM Forum specifications.
But Wade said, “The aggregate TMF interface is not as good as the APIs underneath.”
Fierce asked AvidThink principal analyst Roy Chua why OSS vendors such as Netcracker, Amdocs and CSG, to name a few, would refuse to publish their APIs.
Chua said historically OSS and BSS software has been “relatively custom on a carrier basis,” so “what would be the value in opening up those APIs?” He also said public APIs come with costs. The vendors would have to constantly maintain and publish any changes. And he noted that many of these vendors are involved with the TM Forum, which, from their perspective, is akin to opening up their APIs.
The hyperscaler approach to APIs is fast
Wade thinks the telecom industry complicates things via the TM Forum. He’s a big fan of the hyperscaler approach to APIs. He said, “If AWS published a new service at Re:Invent, two days later a customer can use that API.”
Chua agreed that the hyperscaler way is fast. “That’s the way the web grew up,” he said. “You publish, aggressively iterate, see if the industry can keep up, and then deprecate the API. I think the telcos historically know one way and not the other way. They need to learn the web-centric approach.”
But he cautioned that “telcos are not set up to move as quickly.”
How does this fit with all the other API activity?
There’s a lot of activity in the telco world related to APIs. And it’s a bit of a hornet’s nest to get into.
Wade focused on the work at the TM Forum because Itential is concerned with internal network functions. And that’s what TM Forum is trying to wrangle.
There are other API initiatives to allow external parties to access telco networks via APIs. For instance, in 2024 Ericsson corralled some of the world’s largest telecom operators to combine and sell network APIs on a global scale.
And in late 2023 Nokia unveiled its Network as Code platform and developer portal. There are also standards and open source groups working on telco APIs, including the Linux Foundation, GSMA and ETSI.
If this all sounds complicated, that's because it is. And that's exactly Wade's point - it doesn't have to be this way.