Deutsche Telekom (DT) is amping up efforts to market its portfolio of network APIs to developers and business customers with the creation of a dedicated business unit called Magenta API Capability Exposure, or MACE.
The move was first announced on LinkedIn by Peter Arbitter, who until recently served as DT’s senior vice-president of portfolio & product marketing for enterprise customers as well as SVP of business unit Global SD-x.
Arbitter has now moved over to the operator’s technology & innovation division to take on the role of SVP of MACE, reporting to group chief technology officer Abdu Mudesir.
The MACE unit was formally launched on January 1. According to comments emailed to FierceWireless by a DT spokesperson, Arbitter is responsible for “bundling up Deutsche Telekom’s activities all around the exposure of the network capabilities in strong alignment with the sales and the delivery units of the NatCos,” which is how DT refers to its individual national operators.
The spokesperson added that Arbitter will “transition the current MACE project over time into a line organization.”
API times
Last year, DT launched its first three network APIs under the brand “MagentaBusiness API,” in collaboration with Ericsson-owned Vonage. The aim here is to allow developers and business customers to build apps and services that communicate with DT’s network in Germany. Three APIs are currently being made available: Quality-on-demand, Device Status and Device Location.
According to Arbitter, MagentaBusiness API “will be one of our growth areas of the future” and enables DT to expose APIs “in addition to the well-known CPaaS (communication platform as a service) APIs.”
“The new APIs will allow our customers to further digitize their core processes by using information as well as additional functionality from our network,” he said, indicating that further announcements will be made at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in February 2024.
He added: “This is not only the start of Deutsche Telekom’s journey, but also that of the industry towards the de-composition of telco services. For me this is as an important step as the introduction of cloud computing has been for the IT industry.”
When it launched its first three network APIs, DT made reference to the GSMA Open Gateway initiative that was launched at MWC 2023 and promotes APIs that are developed within the open source CAMARA project.
According to the spokesperson, “DT holds several leadership positions in the CAMARA project and is working to coordinate new APIs with other operators and the greater community in this open source project. Since [the] CAMARA project is where the development of Open Gateway APIs takes place, you can assume that some of the APIs in development will be coming to DT in the future.”
Open Gateway aims to define a federated platform that is designed to provide universal access to operator networks for developers.
According to the GSMA, 39 operator groups now support the initiative under an MoU, representing 228 mobile networks and 64% of global connections. Supportive vendors include AWS, Ericsson, Microsoft Azure, Nokia, Infobip and more.
As of early December, Open Gateway APIs had been commercially launched on 11 networks worldwide, although not all of them have been publicly announced, and 19 CAMARA APIs have been published and are ready for use.