Orange is opening up more than 20 APIs to developers in a new self-service platform as it looks to encourage innovative services.
The APIs are public and can also be accessed through a partnership contract. Orange has grouped them into three areas. The first is core operator assets such as identity, payments, communications and the cloud. The second relates to the Internet of Things and proximity-based services. The third are services dedicated to Africa and the Middle-East.
Orange said that it is constantly updating its market standards documentation and publishing code samples and open source SDKs on the GitHub platform.
The operator encouraging developers to use its Orange Partner site, where they can access IoT development kits for both LoRa and LTE-based solutions, get Orange customers to test their applications, and read API use-cases, recommendations and feedback from more than 100 partners.
Developers will also have access to a range of Orange-backed start-up schemes such as its Fab accelerator, as well as advice from marketing, technical and business development experts.
Opening up APIs has been a priority of Orange Group’s tech chief Mari-Noëlle Jégo-Laveissière. She told Mobile Europe in 2014: “We need to leverage tech development from start-ups…and a big theme is how we open the innovation chain as much as we can.”
Orange gave two examples of companies that have successfully uses its APIs. Sycelim is a Côte d’Ivoire start-up that used Orange’s SMS API to improve messenging between healthcare providers and insurance companies.
American start-up Sharalike used Orange’s cloud API to allow the operator’s customers to save and share videos created using the animation company’s software.