Accenture's Boris Maurer puts open APIs at the heart of the telco's future

As Accenture's communications and media industry lead for Europe, Boris Maurer has a broad view of industry challenges and the measures that telcos are adopting in an effort to create new revenue streams and underpin future growth – or at least, it is hoped.

Cloud-native processes, open architectures and open APIs are among the more interesting and potentially more fruitful developments in recent years. Although there have been barriers along the way, this year has seen increased impetus from programs including the TM Forum's Open API and Open Digital Architecture (ODA) initiatives as well as the GSMA's Open Gateway program, formed out of the CAMARA open source API development project.

Accenture itself has supported ODA from inception and also was part of the TM Forum Catalyst program at DTW2023 - Ignite in Copenhagen, looking at how to standardize these initiatives effectively to allow for widespread adoption. One of the Catalyst projects it was involved in was titled "5G enablement through industry-standardized APIs," which has the broad aim of developing a solution that provides an aligned and unified set of APIs.

In an interview with Light Reading, Maurer mused that much has changed over the years in how operators approach innovation and service creation. Stung by the arrival of faster moving entities such as hyperscalers and over-the-top players, telcos are now more willing to embrace the idea of openness and exposing APIs to enable the creation of new services in a more standardized and interoperable way.

 In his view, the ODA framework, which aims to create simpler IT solutions that are easier and cheaper to deploy, integrate and upgrade, is "hugely valuable" because it allows services to be scaled within and across telcos, and enables telcos to rethink how they are exposing their services and resources to others, in turn creating new monetization opportunities.

 "Conceptually, this is a fantastic thing. The problem is, ODA is still young," Maurer said, noting that it is still too early to call this a success. At the same time, telco CIOs are keen to adopt it as the new standard in the IT space, and all operator groups are moving towards it, although at a different pace. "For the first time it's a movement by the individual players towards a standard, which we haven't seen before. And this is good ... it's all upside for the industry," he said.

Growing alignment 

 When it comes to networks, however, there are a number of fora that Mauer said "effectively all discuss components of the same problem." Here, he cites the GSMA and TM Forum along with CAMARA, the ORAN Alliance, NGMN and the Telecom Infra Project (TIP).

 "We need to make sure that, like the discussion that we started five, six, seven years ago in the IT space, now when we go to the network domain, we're not basically putting ourselves on a path where we end up with Deutsche Telekom APIs and Vodafone APIs and some other operator's APIs, or competing standards from the different fora, and nothing is working together again," Maurer said.

In his view, the alignment of the GSMA, CAMARA and TM Forum over Open Gateway is an important step forward. "I hope that with the power of those institutions, and also with the engagement of the operators, we're making a good step in the right direction. It's not that we're there, but I think it is a necessary step, otherwise, it would never work."

 He added: "I think if a handful of CTOs would agree on just moving forward, the rest would follow. So if Verizon, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom and Orange would just move forward … it would probably happen globally … I think this is still an open discussion."

 In terms of the drive to create an API marketplace on top of the network, Maurer said one development that could prove to be a catalyst here is the planned separation of networks in Italy by both Telecom Italia and WindTre.

"That could be a real-world use-cases where they say, we want to go ahead with this," he said. "That could be an accelerating event" in terms of driving standards for network exposure.

As for what the future telco could look like if all goes to plan, Maurer cites a concept at Accenture called the digital core.

"The telco of the future will reorganize around the digital core… and the digital core is API first," he said. "The future digital core of a telco is a set of APIs that are powered by data and AI, and are sitting on an abstracted physical network … That has been always the dream, but it [was previously] so far away from reality, because of all the legacy stack and the legacy complexities."

As operators shut down older 3G and copper networks, and move to fiber and 5G, "we are in a situation where we basically can manage all those networks in the cloud, more or less centrally. This is no longer a dream," Maurer added. "You can then say that the future telco is an orchestrator that will provide a customer and a developer experience on top of APIs, to create value and services on top."