AT&T and Telia advance automation between operators
Telia and global telecommunications company AT&T have together taken a major step towards fully automated and digitalized services by launching global industry standard MEF’s LSO Sonata APIs between their respective production systems. This enables even more efficient processes with automatic and up-to-date information about, for example, service availability, quotes and orders through one system rather than using multiple ones.
“The benefits with this integration are clear,” says Mikko Suur-Askola, Senior International Wholesale Manager at Telia’s Global Business Sales. “The LSO Sonata APIs enable us to automate several processes. We enable the customer to, for example, initiate a quote request and an order entirely within their own system, as it is now integrated with ours. Of course, there are also positive environmental effects with automated processes as less travelling to customer site is needed as information is available real time in IT systems. All this paves the way for a future where we build a better, more connected world.”
MEF is a global industry association of network, cloud, and technology providers, which “drive network transformation to power the digital economy”. One of its APIs, or Application Programming Interface, the LSO Sonata, addresses the business-to-business layer of inter-provider interactions. The purpose of Sonata is to define a common standard in which providers’ systems can communicate directly with each other.
“In the past, we have handled requests by emails and portals, requiring both parties to actively work on the requests. When the customer can instead initiate requests entirely within their own system, they can be provided with an immediate response and valid quote,” Suur-Askola says.
Suur-Askola adds that automating certain tasks offers businesses the opportunity and freedom to allocate resources better and allow talented and highly educated employees to focus on higher domain tasks. At the same time, Telia is speeding up its quoting-and-ordering processes to near real-time response times.
John Nolan, Vice President, Global Connections and Alliance Management at AT&T, says that the standardization of business application interoperability is a critical component in evolving the industry.
“Standardized APIs are the future of how global providers will do business together at scale. AT&T’s integration with Telia is an important step as we extend our global carrier collaboration based on the MEF LSO Sonata API standards,” Nolan says.
Telia continues to work extensively with MEF. Read more about MEF here.
Cookie notification
Cookies allow us to optimize your use of our website. We also use third-parties cookies for advertising and analytics. Please read our Cookie Policy for more information.