- Ericsson and 12 major operators are forming a new company to sell network application programming interfaces (APIs)
- Nokia’s not part of the venture – it’s got its own API ecosystem
- Nokia says it will continue to focus on extending its reach into the developer and solution provider communities
Before the ink was barely dry on Ericsson’s news that it’s forming a new company to monetize network application programming interfaces (APIs), a lot of people asked: What’s it mean for Nokia?
After all, its major Scandinavian rival had just corralled 12 of the largest telecom operators in the world to create a new powerhouse aimed at monetizing network APIs. The joint venture, owned 50% by Ericsson and 50% by the operators, will provide network APIs to a broad ecosystem of developer platforms, including hyperscalers, systems integrators and independent software vendors.
Ericsson called it a “historic and industry-defining” collaboration. AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon sang its praises, along with executives from América Móvil, Bharti Airtel, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Reliance Jio, Singtel, Telefonica, Telstra and Vodafone.
But according to Nokia, it merely justifies what Nokia’s been doing for the past year or so.
“This further validates the meshed API ecosystem approach that Nokia has been driving over the past year since we launched the Network as Code platform,” a Nokia spokesperson said in a statement provided to Fierce.
The Ericsson-led initiative is guided by CAMARA and GSMA Open Gateway standards and is not exclusive to any alliance. “All operators are working with multiple aggregator partners to reach developer audiences, and that remains the path that Nokia will continue to lead and follow,” the Finnish vendor said.
Nokia already has agreements with more than 20 partners, including operators like BT, DT, Orange, Telefonica and Telecom Argentina. It syndicates its Network as Code APIs on aggregator marketplaces like Google and Infobip.
“We continue to focus on extending our reach into developer and solution provider communities, leveraging our extensive industrial partnerships and private wireless customers,” the Nokia representative said.
TM Forum CTO George Glass had a response similar to Nokia’s, in that the Ericsson-led venture is “further proof” of the importance of collaboration across the entire ecosystem.
"Fragmentation has prevented API monetization initiatives from succeeding in the past, but with Open Gateway the whole industry has united around a common purpose, and everyone is playing their part, including the hyperscalers, operators and the industry organizations,” Glass said in a statement.
Same ol’ same ol’?
Clearly, the standards groups are making headway. The Linux Foundation today is celebrating its first official release from the CAMARA project. Dubbed “Meta-Release Fall24,” the release contains 25 APIs across 13 sub projects that have been vetted for quality, consistency and stability. Carrier billing, device reachability status and device roaming status are among the APIs included in the release.
But many remember earlier developer initiatives, like the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) in 2010 and the GSMA’s OneAPI Exchange initiative in 2013, that didn’t take off.
What’s different now? For one thing, CAMARA is focused on providing intent-based APIs rather than merely technical APIs, according to Markus Kümmerle, chair of the CAMARA Marketing Committee. He also leads the CAMARA activities at Deutsche Telekom.
“We think this time we will be successful,” he told Fierce.
And what about Nokia’s absence in the new company spearheaded by Ericsson? Kümmerle said there’s nothing to exclude Nokia from interacting with this new company. “We want to be open,” he said.
No big deal
Roger Entner, founder of Recon Analytics, said the Ericsson-led initiative doesn’t mean that much for Nokia. “We’re still early in the game,” he said.
“Technically, this API problem largely has been solved,” he told Fierce. “What Ericsson is providing here is another technical solution to a business problem. What is really needed is a very transparent, easy way for developers to work with telcos.”
If the Ericsson venture is to be successful, it needs to make pricing and terms and conditions very simplified for developers – like, one price across the board and across operators globally, he said.
“They have to be the Twilio of APIs,” he said. “Why does Twilio exist? Because it’s so difficult to work with the carriers,” he said, adding that the cloud communications platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) company relieves businesses from having to deal directly with the carriers.
The more the merrier
CCS Insight’s Ian Fogg said on LinkedIn that the risk from a single network vendor-backed initiative is that differences grow between vendor implementations that hurt the network API strategy.
“For developers, it would be easier if Nokia, Samsung Networks, etc. and their operator customers were also on board although that is somewhat wishful thinking here. So, this company does not yet deliver complete global scale, just much greater scale,” Fogg said.
Competition in this space is good, said Will Townsend of Moor Insights & Strategy. Nokia has established quite a bit of momentum since it launched its Network as Code initiative. Broadly speaking, he thinks the push for programmability continues to build, buoyed by the open source community, the GSMA, as well as joint operator and infrastructure developments.
“Having the open-source community, the GSMA, and two of the leading cellular infrastructure providers betting big on programmability is a good thing,” he concluded in a blog “It has led to a newfound development rhythm – one that I believe will lead to programmability’s ultimate success.”