The T Developers Portal will be the one-stop shop for the global developer community to interact with Deutsche Telekom and its APIs.
In Deutsche Telekom’s 2030 strategy, “Telco as a platform” plays a center role. Consequently, the company is evolving into a software company that sells telecommunications services. A central feature of a platform is the ability to access its services via formalized interfaces without knowledge of the inner workings. This means that Telco as a platform requires the ability to provide interfaces to the platform to any type of consumer.
The tool of choice for accessing data and functionality both inside of and between companies are Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). With the upcoming T Developers Portal, of which we give you a sneak peek today, we provide the one-stop shop for all purposes around Deutsche Telekom Telco API consumption and provisioning.
The portal will be used by both API consumers and providers and be accompanied by a set of tools to allow automated access to many functions. Here, developers and further stakeholders can discover available and planned APIs and find documentation on APIs and API use.
The T Developers Portal will thus be the central platform for Deutsche Telekom to interact with external developers. As Mario Bodemann, who is the first Developer Evangelist at Deutsche Telekom, puts it: “The portal follows a strict developer centric approach. Here you will find everything you need, such as information about a certain API, a cost breakdown and, of course, the possibility to subscribe to and be able to call the API reliably.”
Regular acquisition of user feedback and continuous observation of the use of developer tools and the APIs themselves will provide the necessary data points to continually improve consumer experience. Thus, research has been part of T Developers since day one. Our research team conducted both quantitative and qualitative developer community research and led usability tests of the platform in various stages of its development.
The same goes for API incubation, where again research is a part of an end-to-end API development process within three major phases: API Discovery, API Incubation, and API Validation.
Mario Bodemann: “As we developers know, it’s hard sometimes that people create something without considering us, right? But here we make the difference – we focus on you, the developers. We ask you what your developer use case is, without developing away from you.”
What you can currently see is a preview of the full-blown portal which will be launched later this year. The full T Developers Portal will provide developers with secure, well-documented and supported products which will let you easily integrate Deutsche Telekom services into their apps. The current version already offers a number on interesting use cases for the SMS API and the Calls API, so go check it out: https://developer.telekom.com
