• A baker’s dozen of Asian telcos endorse the recently announced Bridge Alliance API Exchange (BAEx), aimed at exposing a raft of telco APIs to multinational enterprises
• It’s an ‘in-house’ affair since they are all members of the predominantly Asia-focused Bridge Alliance, which spawned the API initiative in collaboration with Singtel
• The majority of Bridge Alliance members have still to publicly throw their weight behind BAEx, but the group’s CEO, Ong Geok Chwee, seemed confident that more operators will come on board.

It’s not a bad start. Barely a month after the Bridge Alliance unveiled its ‘Bridge Alliance API exchange’ (BAEx), a total of 13 operators, according to the official announcement, have now “endorsed” the initiative.

They all hail from Asia and are all signed-up members of the Bridge Alliance: Airtel (India), AIS (Thailand), China Unicom, CSL (Hong Kong), CTM (Macau), Globe (Philippines), Maxis (Malaysia), Mobifone (Vietnam), Optus (Australia), Singtel (Singapore), SK Telecom (South Korea), Taiwan Mobile and Telkomsel (Indonesia).

BAEx, powered by Singtel’s Paragon orchestration platform, aims to aggregate a swathe of telco application programming interfaces (APIs) and accelerate their adoption by developers, solution providers and enterprises. The initiative fits into the ethos of the Bridge Alliance, which celebrates its 20^th anniversary this year, of allowing its members to scale up more easily the delivery of services to large enterprises across multiple markets.

Bridge Alliance CEO Dr Ong Geok Chwee enthused that the backing of “so many operators” will see BAEx “go from strength to strength”.

“Through BAEx as a single interface enabling regional consumption of telco APIs, we will continue to accelerate telco API exposure for operators,” he added. “Enterprise customers will be able to consume telco APIs for their regional business with ease. More importantly, all parties benefit from our streamlined technical and commercial framework when working with BAEx.”

According to Bridge Alliance’s website, it has 35 operator members, which means a sizeable majority of them are still keeping their powder dry when it comes to BAEx “endorsement”.  These include China Telecom, Softbank (Japan), Middle Eastern operator STC and Bridge Alliance newbie Deutsche Telekom, which is collaborating with the alliance on “IoT business opportunities”.

“We welcome more operators and commercial customers to connect with BAEx for co-innovation,” remarked the Bridge Alliance CEO.

APIs already available, more on the way

BAEx builds on the GSMA's Open Gateway initiative and Camara, the open-source project for developers to access network capabilities that is backed by the Linux Foundation in collaboration with the GSMA. Among the APIs that the Bridge Alliance is initially harnessing from the GSMA’s work for use in its own API exchange are Number Verify and SIM Swap, which are primarily targeted at the fintech sector and designed for a “seamless mobile authentication process”.

Other BAEx APIs in the pipeline include eKYC (electronic know your customer) and QoD (quality-of-service on demand).

– Ken Wieland, Contributing Editor, TelecomTV