As part of its five-year Tech2025 strategy, Vodafone Group is implementing a digital-first customer engagement plan. To that end, it is deploying a single, autonomous cloud architecture and massive automation. The intention is that 90% of customers interactions will be digital, with the necessary automation underpinned by a zero-cost integration target and plan.

Vodafone recognized that leveraging industry-standard APIs and data modeling are fundamental to the success of Tech2025’s radical goals as it moves to adopt the platform business model – developing a connected ecosystem to deliver new products and services. For this approach to deliver its full potential, the APIs must be consistent, available, and reused at every opportunity. To this end, Vodafone introduced the API-First rule right across its organization, whereby every API exposed in a local market or on global platforms must fully conform with the operator’s common API standards and definitions.

Vodafone adopted TM Forum’s Open APIs suite as the basis for all its APIs, hence maintaining conformance with Forum’s APIs as they evolve is essential too. The CSP took a two-pronged approach to ensuring conformity, setting up an API Guild and developing an automated API-conformance engine that is constantly measured by various KPIs.

Working with Torry Harris Integration Solutions (THIS), a specialist API strategy and delivery service provider, Vodafone designed and developed an automated API-conformance engine to verify API conformance against any official standard reference, supporting polymorphic extensions specified by TM Forum Open APIs to support new capabilities.

To make decisions about the APIs, Vodafone created the API Architecture Guild. This is a distributed function based on the open-source behaviors of transparency, participation, and efficacy. Its role is to provide the people, processes, guidelines, and tools to increase and support TM Forum's Open APIs' adoption, usage, development, and extensions. The Guild has about 160 members now, and Tene expects it to keep growing. Many more Guilds have sprung up within Vodafone because it has worked so well. He says that to date, API Guild has only had to vote once to reach a majority decision – the rest of the time there has been 100% agreement within it.

Since automating API conformance, Vodafone has seen a 50% increase in the adoption of Open APIs across its markets. It is difficult to estimate the benefits, but significantly improved time to market, customer experience (through consistency across channels), and efficiency (through re-use). With an average of five clients per open API, the re-use benefit alone equates to a 76% saving compared to point-to-point integration.