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France Telecom: Orange

Empowering Emerging Markets through API Publication


Orange is the key brand of France Telecom, one of the worlds leading telecommunications operators. As the number three mobile operator and number two provider of broadband internet services in Europe, as well as a global leader in telecom services for MNCs, Orange Group's strategy is characterized by a strong focus on innovation and working to develop its position in new growth activities. One area of growth opportunity lies in API publication. In much the same way that publishing a Web site can expose a local business to a global marketplace, making APIs available online can help drive new partnerships, improve customer satisfaction and build value added services around a brand, all of which can lead to increased revenue opportunities. Oranges Nursery initiative is aimed at just that publishing their telecom services, provisioning, management and configuration APIs in order to foster innovation and reduce cost of/time to market for new services.

Orange by the Numbers


132.6M mobile customers 13.5M internet customers Provides consumer services in 32 countries worldwide Supports enterprise customers in 166 countries #3 mobile provider and #2 broadband provider in Europe 2009 Revenue = 50.9B Euros

The Business Challenge


But the Nursery was originally envisioned as a walled garden, intended for France Telecoms internal divisions and select partners who have the resources, expertise and technology infrastructure in place to take advantage of such an initiative. Emerging countries, with their under-resourced developer communities and infrastructure limitations (i.e., unreliable power/broadband infrastructure) are not able to easily leverage the full range of functionality offered by the Nursery. For these reasons, Orange created Emerginov. Emerginov is an innovative Telco platform specifically designed for emerging countries, allowing local partners and public entities to build and host micro-services that citizens can access through the common technology denominator of mobile phones. The approach is novel, but the thinking is sound: by combining the power of their global telecom infrastructure with the know-how of the local populace Orange can overcome emerging country limitations to create telecom solutions that address local needs. In practice, Emerginov offers an open source platform for development (based on software like Apache, MySQL, JOnAS, PHP, Mobicents, Asterisk or OpenSIPS etc), as well as online disk storage for hosted applications, services and associated data all of which gives local developers the tools and resources they need to take full advantage of the Nursery. Through Emerginov, local partners and select public entities (such as universities) gain access to the range of telecom services offered by the Nursery, including IVRs, SMS systems, VOIP infrastructure, Text to Speech engines, etc. In this way, Emerginov allows local stakeholders to create practical services with just a few lines of code, without needing to set up and maintain their own systems. But publicly exposing APIs presents some unique challenges around how they get packaged, secured and managed for easy consumption.

Enter Layer 7
As envisioned, each partner would typically require only a subset of existing APIs, but that subset may vary for each partner. Obviously, creating multiple subsets or filtered views of Oranges APIs (especially as those APIs changed over time) would quickly become unmanageable.

France Telecom: Orange Case Study

The key to making APIs useful to partners and manageable for staff was Layer 7. Layer 7 SecureSpan XML Gateway Gate allowed Orange to create a layer of abstraction or indirection between what functionality they published internally and what functionality they exposed to partners. Policy Policy-based controls allowed Orange to define the message, identity and interface level security for the APIs; tracking usage; monitoring interface health; managing, versioning managing and updating APIs, etc. all without breaking client applications. As a core component of both Oranges Nursery and Emerginov, the Layer 7 SecureSpan XML Gateway gives Orange Gatewa visibility into who is using which API, as well as allowing them to extract billing information, validate SLA conformance and track usage for capacity planning.

The Solutions
Since first proposed in December 2009, Emerginov has gained rapid acceptance and now has a number of 09, initiatives to its credit, including: In Mauritius, students have used Emerginov to create a mash up of Google maps and local police traffic mash-up reports. Now, anyone with a GSM GSM-capable phone can access a map of traffic patterns for their area. area Most Senegalese dont have computer access to the information found on typical online discussion forums like Facebook. Using Emerginov, locals have developed a new application called Kisaitoo which allows citizens to post their question to any Facebook forum using their mobile phone. Dialing the service questions phone and talking into their phone causes a speech-to-text engine to convert their query to text , which is then posted to the forum . Replies to t posting are sent back to the original poster as SMS the messages .

The Results
Benefits have been quick to accrue: by providing developers with secure access to telecom service and data APIs ecure via the Nursery, Orange has created a far more agile IT platform on which to develop new offerings faster and at less cost by reusing/recomposing existing services services. Making the Nursery available to local partners in third world countries via Emerginov has resulted in the creation of revenue-generating services designed by the people, for the people. In this way, Orange has overcome many of the barriers that had previously limited their growth in emerging markets.

Copyright 2011 Layer 7 Technologies Inc. All rights reserved. SecureSpan and the Layer 7 Technologies design mark are trademarks of Layer 7 Technologies Inc. All other trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective owners.

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