Sparring Partners | APIs: the good, the bad, the debatable

APIs have been around for a long time, but in the last couple of years have become one of the brightest beacons of monetization, even though their role is much wider than that. With the GSMA launch of the Open Gateway, there are signs of growth and adoption, but also questions about adoption paths, use cases and business models.

In this Sparring Partners, Markus Kümmerle, Deutsche Telekom and CAMARA, Daryl Schoolar at Recon Analytics and Monica Paolini at Senza Fili dissected the opportunities and challenges of APIs and look into what’s ahead for operators, application developers, hyperscalers, and everybody else in the ecosystem.

• Use cases: What are APIs good for?
• API definition: What’s the role of open, internal, operator-specific and vendor-specific APIs?
• Monetization: Will APIs be better at improving network efficiency or at generating new revenues?
• Business models: Who will pay for APIs? What services need APIs?

In more detail, this is what we talked about (register to go to the sections you are interested in):

• 00:04 Introduction
• 03:13 Daryl introduction
• 04:03 Markus introduction
• 05:26 APIs are not new; why are they hot now?
• 08:58 Learning lessons from first-gen APIs, operators’ participation and support, APIs and 5G, GSMA, CAMARA
• 11:40 APIs as interfaces, different types of APIs, monetization, API strategies of mobile operators, deployment roadmap
• 16:35 API aggregators
• 18:23 Reaching out to app developers, will they pay for APIs? More on monetization
• 21:44 Number verification as an example of monetization
• 24:11 Exposing network capabilities: good or bad? Security issues
• 29:23 Coverage, consent, regulation, country-specific requirements
• 34:08 Scalability, upgrades, version control, availability
• 39:50 Long-term support for APIs, network effects, market dynamics
• 41:31 Open source, TM Forum APIs, Wi-Fi APIs, the role of 3GPP, more on CAMARA