4900 Hopyard Rd., Suite 310 Pleasanton, CA 94588 USA www.webnms.com +1 925 924 9500 2013 ZOHO Corporation WebNMS is a trademark of ZOHO Corporation All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. There is a huge trend of connecting internet applications via REST APIs. The service providers are opening up their networks and providing access to core assets in ways unforeseen, presenting opportunities to innovative developers, which in turn drives up bandwidth usage and revenue. These APIs are a means for communication transactions and the use cases vary dramatically. Many are GPS location and mapping or social/media file sharing or SMS/MMS based services. Several are business and productivity integration types. For a List: http://www.programmableweb.com One challenge for a service provider is to monitor, control, and secure these API transactions. As the volume and the importance of the API calls to go through both climb, so does the need for management. To solve this, Alcatel-Lucent has a framework called the Open API Platform. It allows a service provider or large enterprise to expose APIs and allow data to be shared between applications. However, it’s much more than exposing an API. Monitoring and control in a carrier class environment is a different animal. It includes a single place to onboard 3rd party API application developers and partners, manage and perform analytics, and monetize the services. The platform transforms API hooks to the native or proprietary interfaces of underlying systems in a clearly defined and secure model. The Open API Platform provides a front door for developers to create APIs and to provision their applications. They configure application parameters and create rules for how they can be used, the number of transactions that are allowed, etc. Then developers are able to view their own performance on which APIs are heavily used, the transaction times, and on how the APIs perform. The platform also has a business management system to set up billing. The platform has a System Management Portal (SMP) that looks at the health and performance of the framework and is responsible for functional FCAPS (Fault, Configuration, Accounting, Performance, and Security). It can reside at the service provider NOC or be installed in the Cloud running on a rack with Linux and MySQL. Centralization of the management functions is key to operations and keeping costs down. Not all environments are alike and customizing the System Management Portal adds to the importance. WebNMS Case Study Connecting the Internet: Alcatel-Lucent Open API Platform