APIs, APIs, the greatest secrets operators possess

The announcement means that Telefonica and Telenor will offer the same payment API to anyone who wants to take advantage of carrier billing. That could be the big sites they mentioned, Facebook, Google, Blackberry, but also other retailers and online stores. A supermarket with an online store, say, could offer users the option to pay for an item direct to their mobile bill. 

 

It’s not about common app distribution – it’s a focus on a payment API that says, if you want to do carrier billing on your site, the API will be the same if the user is with Telefonica or Telenor. 

 

Once upon a three years ago, of course, operators started trying to align a whole load of APIs within the oneAPI project. These common APIs would include other network-related APIs such as location, messaging, voice calling, device capabilities and status. 

 

It proved too difficult, despite some progress in Canada, to bring these to market. Part of the problem was that there was not only a focus on aligning network APIs, but on common app distribution from a centralised wholesale app store as well. If the industry had “merely” gone to developers and said, “Here are a load of common ways to build call control, messaging, location and payment options into your apps and stores,” that would have been one message.

 

Telling them to do all that, and then put those same “API enriched” apps into a wholesale store, that operators would then resell, was a different thing entirely. Especially as it turned out that a developer using WAC would still need to negotiate unilateral commercial terms with individual operators, rather than on a wholesale basis with WAC.

 

It was also never clear exactly how much effort operators were putting behind oneAPI. Telefonica, for example, forged ahead with Litmus, which turned into BlueVia, without it ever being obvious how the APIs that were being offered to developers through Litmus and BlueVia were going to be reconciled with oneAPI. Telefonica tended to talk in terms of its Blue Via APIs as being incremental, or enhanced, versions of oneAPI. oneAPi was portrayed as being more suitable for a broader swathe of operators happy to settle for something less optimised.

 

So… the app distribution side of things broke down and with that the APIs that had been developed within oneAPI and then rolled into the WAC project, were bought this year by API aggregator Apigee. 

 

Are we seeing, though, the industry still attempting to move to a de-facto oneAPI – a move to form common APIs agreed between groups of operators? This might take the form of a group of operators choosing the “best” API that each of them has, and other operators working to that. This is exactly what happened with Telenor. Telefonica described itself as the leader, Telenor as the follower. 

 

Why bother? Well, although the Telenor-Telefonica partnership is a good start, it doesn’t  solve the problem of lack of cross-network coverage. If you are a Vodafone customer accessing that online store, say, with its BlueVia payment API handling billing integration, you can’t access the carrier billing option. Or rather, you could but only if the store has implemented Vodafone’s payment API as well. Extra work for the retailer, who could instead be tempted to use the services of a payment aggregator, who offers the store one relationship to handle, and then deals with the carrier-side stuff themselves.

 

So it would still be better for the operators and for the online stores if there were more commonality. Mobile Europe suspects that there are moves happening to enable this – not perhaps on the grand industry wide version of oneAPI, but between a tighter group of key operators. 

 

In September there was a story on www.technology-digitial.com that said that 5 big operators were working to develop a common app store. Without wishing to impugn the writer of that story, I think this is a misinterpretation of the briefing the writer was given. The tech-digital story relied entirely for its information on what looked to be an interview with Heavy Reading Analyst Caroline Chappell, who had in turn had a briefing with Vodafone’s Michel Burger.

 

Mobile Europe contacted Chappell to ask if the story had any grounding. Her reply said that some of the remarks had been taken out of context, and that she was not convinced that the outcome of the cooperation she was talking about would be an app store. But she stuck to her view that there is work under way to federate APIs between operators – specifically AT&T, Vodafone, Telefonica, DT and Verizon. She said:

 

“These companies are, however, working on a way of federating the APIs that applications use so that if a consumer is running an app on an AT&T network that uses a Vodafone API, the AT&T network will pass the request to the Vodafone API. Vodafone is not the leader or chief architect, as this story claims, but one of the  companies cooperating in this initiative.”

 

We asked Telefonica to comment on the Tech-Digital story. We asked: “Is Telefonica working with other operators to federate APIs?” Telefonica confirmed that the tech-digital was incorrect so far as it related to app stores. The story should have been “relating not to app stores but to other initiatives.” What these other initiatives are remained unspoken, but Jose Valles, Head of BlueVia, provided the following comment:

 

“At this stage BlueVia are working to join Telenor’s direct to bill API with the current payment API available through the BlueVia portal. The vision is to expand to a global payment ecosystem and therefore we’re open to discussions with other partners who share this vision for direct to bill payments. We will jointly explore other innovative APIs aimed at different areas of the market in time but the path and vision we have chosen to focus is held by both Telenor and Telefonica.”

 

It’s obvious that Telefonica would benefit from other carriers harmonising their payment APIs with Telefonica. It only boosts the range of developers working to its Blue Via platform. It is “open” to other operators joining in. But is there a specific, five operator-strong body working on this? That is less clear. 

 

We also asked Deutsche Telekom, and DT confirmed that is was working with other operators. However, it said it was doing so as under the aegis of the GSMA, which took some WAC activities back as what it calls its fast track projects, this one being run by John Donovan of AT&T. DT said:

 

“Yes, it is correct that ‘DT is working with a group of other operators to provide harmonised network APIs to developers’.  This is indeed related to the tranfer of the WAC activities into GSMA in the form of so-called Fast-Track Projects.”

 

So, it seems that there may be two things going on here. One is some sort of GSMA co-ordinated post-WAC network API project – which may or not be the Five operator-strong co-ordinated Heavy Reading’s Chappell is referring to. The other activity is more private, between pairs or small groups of operators, but with a view to widening the scope of such partnerships later – such as the Telenor-Telefonica agreement. To be honest, it’s hard to tell. But one thing is clear. Telcos still see APIs as critical enablers of third party partnerships and of development platforms, and critical to their own long term futures.

 

Keith Dyer

Editor

Mobile Europe