Axiata, Vodafone work with industry fora to speed commercial deployments

23 Oct 2019

TM Forum’s latest application program interfaces (APIs) were developed in collaboration with Axiata, Vodafone Group and the IoT Forum.

They build on the Forum’s suite of more than 50, open REST-based APIs, which have been developed collaboratively and are said to be used by more than 7,000 software developers in over 1,200 companies worldwide.

New ground

The new suite should also speed prototyping and commercial deployments so that service providers can rapidly expand their IoT offerings into vertical markets.

In addition to including established TM Forum Open APIs – such as for alarm management, resource management and activation APIs – the IoT Device Management API Component Suite includes an IoT Data Access Endpoint API developed by TM Forum’s Chief API and Ecosystem Architect Pierre Gauthier.

This supports access to data using different types of protocols (such as MQTT IoT and CoAP). It encapsulates them so devices to be easily integrated into solutions that are suitable for a number of uses, including smart cities and smart factories, among others.

In a 5G future

“In the 5G future, industry verticals will be served by ecosystems of partners that will provide a highly flexible, scalable set of digital capabilities,” said Anthony Rodrigo, Group CIO, Axiata Group Berhad.

He added, “The Open API-based IoT Device Management API Component Suite is a key step in building the ecosystem and an example of how collaboration and standardisation can solve some of the communications industry’s biggest challenges.

“We were keen to be a contributor from the early stage of the API component suite development as it is perfectly aligned to Axiata’s IoT platform and developer engagement strategy.”

“Today’s IoT device ecosystem is burdened by bespoke integration and multiple protocols,” said Joann O’Brien, Vice President, Ecosystem and Labs, TM Forum. “This…is hindering the large-scale commercial application of IoT. By joining forces with Axiata, Vodafone and IoT Forum, we developed an Open API-based solution suite that helps to address this challenge.”

Source: https://bit.ly/2r84DPS