Standardized APIs are essential building blocks for automating business and operational interactions between buyers and sellers to deliver an efficient interconnected, automated ecosystem. Industry organizations—including MEF, the ITW Global Leaders’ Forum (GLF), and TM Forum—have collaborated to drive development and adoption of open, standardized APIs with the goal of unlocking the full potential of this ecosystem.
MEF has introduced sets of standardized business APIs and operational APIs that build upon and enhance TM Forum APIs to enable service providers to “invest once” and scale implementations with many partners and services across automated supply chains that extend to enterprises and cloud providers.
As part of MEF’s Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO), these APIs have been developed by MEF members as a fully standardized reference architecture and framework for enabling end-to-end business and operational automation and orchestration across multiple provider networks.
MEF has created the communication industry’s foundational architecture for a standards-based global ecosystem of automated networks.
The MEF LSO Framework describes the interface reference points for LSO APIs that are required to automate business process functions between ecosystem partners and operational functions between and within network service providers.
MEF refers to these reference points as follows:
Together, the interface reference points enable the full orchestration of digital services across service providers, their partners, cloud providers, and the Internet.
Enabling end-to-end service orchestration with and between providers, to deliver digital services to the enterprise.
Inter-provider APIs for automating business functions east-west between companies.
LSO Business APIs enable buyers and sellers of services to automate different stages of the business lifecycle—including product availability and pricing discovery, quoting, ordering, billing & settlement, and trouble ticketing—between their companies.
The LSO APIs at LSO Cantata allow enterprise customers to automate their business interactions with their service provider partners for activities such as quote, order, billing, and trouble ticketing.
The LSO APIs at LSO Sonata allow retail service providers to automate their business interactions with their suppliers/vendors for activities such as quote, order, billing, and trouble ticketing.
Inter-provider APIs for automating operational functions east-west between companies’ respective business support systems (BSSs).
LSO Operational APIs enable sellers of services to share key elements of the lifecycle of a service with their buyer customers, once it has been ordered and provisioned, all the way through to its decommissioning.
The LSO APIs at LSO Allegro allow enterprise, application and developer customers to automate their operational interactions with their service provider partners for activities such as service change, performance monitoring and fault management.
The LSO APIs at LSO Interlude coordinate a portion of digital LSO services within the partner domain that are managed by a service provider’s Service Orchestration Functionality (SOF), within the bounds and policies defined for the service.
Through LSO Interlude, the SOF may request initiation of technical operations or dynamic control behavior associated with a service with a partner network domain. Such requests must be within the constraints set forth in the policies associated with established services and performed without impacting business applications.
Intra-provider APIs for automating operational functions north-south within the service provider, between its business support systems (BSS) and its operating support systems (OSS).
LSO Operational APIs also enable service providers to automate key elements of the lifecycle of a service internally, once it has been ordered and provisioned, all the way through to its decommissioning.
The LSO APIs at LSO Legato enable a service provider to map product processes in the business layer of its systems to service processes in the operational layer of its systems. LSO Legato APIs cover actions such as service change, performance management, and fault monitoring.
LSO Business APIs enable buyers and sellers of services to automate different stages of the business lifecycle—including product availability and pricing discovery, quoting, ordering, billing & settlement, and trouble ticketing—between their companies.
Explore MEF's LSO APIs for Business AutomationLSO Operational APIs enable sellers of services to share key elements of the lifecycle of a service with their buyer customers and internally, once it has been ordered and provisioned, all the way through to its decommissioning.
Explore MEF's LSO APIs for Operational Automation