Will locate network APIs in a single location to drive application innovation
Alcatel-Lucent has launched a service that will aggregate the APIs of all vendor elements in a service provider’s network, so that service providers have a single secure layer in which they can aggregate all their network APIs.
The equipment manufacturer said that its Application Exposure Suite will be multi-vendor, offering a change in the way service providers currently deal with developers. As well as offering the service to carriers and oeprators, the vendor will be launching a cloud-based version of the Suite, available to developers, called Open API Service.
Kenneth Frank, executive vice president of Solutions and Marketing for Alcatel-Lucent, said that the launch of the service was not about creating “stickiness” or a competitive edge for its own networking equipment.
“This is about trying to fix a fundamental issue in the industry that, if we don’t fix it, will be a far more serious issue for us than individual market share in the network space,” he said. Franks said that users expect a personalized, top quality experience, yet network providers will struggle to provide that, given the increasing amount of traffic they have to support – without the associated revenues.
Frank said that there are currently six service provider customers at the moment “engaged” with the Application Exposure Suite, and a clutch of developers using the Open API Service.
The company also announced a re-emphasis on its professional services capability, to help operators transform their networks and OSS/BSS capabilities to support this “new business model”.
The approach is reminiscent of several other attempts to open up operators’ network service capabilities (such as location and billing) in a managed, aggregated, way to developers. Operators know that there is value to developers in these elements, but with multi-vendor networks and legacy back-office systems to support, the transformation is a lot easier said than done.
As well as earlier SOA-based approaches on .net and other platforms, more recently individual operators have opened up their application development environments, and there are also cross-ndustry initiatives such as OneAPI.