Programmable Is Not the Same as Profitable
Third in a four-part series unpacking the pillars of CASA26.
In March, the GSMA Open Gateway initiative marked its third birthday at MWC Barcelona. The interesting thing wasn’t the milestone. It was the agenda. The headline sessions weren’t about new APIs or new standards — they were about monetisation, business outcomes, and what the programme itself now calls “the demand side.” Aduna’s CEO took the keynote on turning APIs into real-world impact. The closing panels were about which verticals will actually pay.
Read between the lines and the industry is quietly admitting something it spent three years avoiding: the APIs were never the hard part.
That is the real subject of CASA26’s third pillar — Network APIs and telecom transformation. And it’s the pillar where I’ll be most direct, because this is the conversation the industry most needs and most avoids.
The plumbing finally works
It’s worth being fair first. The technical progress is real. Open Gateway is into its third year. CAMARA has standardised a credible set of service APIs. GSMA and TM Forum have a joint conformance certification programme, so an API certified once is trusted across the ecosystem. Aduna — backed by Ericsson and a roster of major operators — has stood up a genuine aggregation layer so a developer doesn’t have to integrate operator by operator. The hyperscalers — AWS, Google Cloud, Azure — have put network APIs into their marketplaces. Vonage, now an Ericsson company, has gone further and built network APIs into the core of its platform rather than treating them as a side catalogue. XConnect has done the unglamorous work of making cross-operator reach actually function.
In other words, the excuse is gone. For years, “it’s still early, the standards aren’t ready” was a fair answer. It no longer is. The road has been built.
So here is the uncomfortable question, and it’s a commercial one, not a technical one: the network is now programmable — but is it profitable? Programmable is not the same as profitable. And the industry has been far better at the first than the second.
We counted the APIs. We forgot to ask what they’re worth.
The recurring failure of the Network API conversation is that it is conducted in the wrong units. We count APIs. We count operators onboarded. We count standards ratified and milestones hit. These are supply-side metrics, and the customer has never once asked how many APIs you have.
The questions that matter are the ones the industry is least comfortable with. What job does this get done, for whom? What does it replace, and is the replacement clearly better? What will someone actually pay, and on what commercial model — per call, per outcome, per seat, revenue share? Until those have answers, an API is a capability, not a business.
Some have already named the shift. Vonage’s Neelam Sandhu, newly into the CMO role, used her CASA25 keynote to reframe the company’s story from connectivity to outcomes — saying out loud the move this entire pillar is really about.
This isn’t pessimism. It’s the opposite. The good news is that the demand side is finally producing real answers — in one area especially.
Identity and fraud is the wedge
The clearest near-term business case for Network APIs is not a new experience. It’s the quiet replacement of a broken one. The one-time password sent by SMS is insecure, easily intercepted, and a genuinely poor experience — and it underpins authentication for half the digital economy. Network APIs like Silent Authentication, Number Verification and SIM Swap detection replace it with something the operator can verify at the network level, in milliseconds, without a code to type.
This is the killer app GSMA has been pointing at — the argument made memorably at CASA25 that digital identity, not connectivity, is the operator’s most valuable and most defensible asset. It now has a regulatory tailwind: age-verification laws tightening across the US, EU and Australia put operators in a position no pure software vendor can occupy, because the trust and the subscriber relationship already sit with them. Beyond identity, Quality-on-Demand — guaranteed network performance for drones, robotics, live broadcast and immersive applications — is the next vertical wave.
The opportunity isn’t only the operators’. It belongs equally to the players who turn raw network signals into something an enterprise can buy with confidence. Shush is a case in point — its Sherlock platform packages identity, trust and fraud capabilities into a product a security team can actually deploy, rather than a kit of APIs they’d have to assemble themselves. In partnership with Twilio, it has already put silent network authentication into production with carriers such as DITO — replacing the SMS one-time password with precisely the network-level verification described above. That packaging layer, where a network signal becomes a business outcome, is where a great deal of the value — and the margin — is going to settle.
Identity and fraud is where the abstract finally becomes commercial: a real pain, a clearly better fix, a buyer who is already regulated into needing it. That is what every other Network API use case has to learn from.
The disintermediation question nobody wants to ask
There is a strategic risk hiding inside all this progress. The aggregation layer that makes Network APIs usable — Aduna, the hyperscaler marketplaces, the channel partners — is also the layer that can stand between the operator and the customer. If operators become the wholesale supplier of capabilities that someone else packages, prices and owns the relationship for, they will have built the road and handed the tolls to someone else.
This is the real “telecom transformation” question, and it’s not technical. It’s about where in the value chain the operator chooses to compete. We heard the early version at CASA25, where the “telco of the future” panel — e&, BT, Deutsche Telekom, Telin — circled exactly this tension between scale, partnership and control. The operators leaning hardest into Network APIs as a commercial discipline rather than a standards exercise — Orange and Vodafone among them, anchoring the Aduna model; BT building programmability into Global Fabric; the Asian operators like Telin treating it as a regional growth play — are the ones taking the question seriously. Whether they can move at the speed the opportunity demands is, as ever with telcos, the open question.
What CASA26 will do with this pillar
The Network API track at CASA26 is built to skip the milestone update and go straight to the commercial core:
- Which use cases actually have a buyer and a price — and which are still capabilities in search of a business?
- What pricing and commercial models survive contact with a real enterprise: per-call, per-outcome, revenue share?
- How do operators avoid being disintermediated by the very aggregators and hyperscalers that make the APIs usable?
- Is identity the wedge that finally makes the rest of the catalogue sellable?
These are analyst-led sessions with the operators, aggregators and platform players living the question — GSMA on the standards and identity story, the aggregation and channel players on distribution, and the operators on whether they can convert structural advantage into revenue before the window narrows.
This is also one of the CASA26 tracks open for a partner to help shape and lead. If your business depends on Network APIs becoming a market rather than a milestone, this is the room where that case gets argued honestly.
The network is finally programmable. Whether the industry programs it into a business — or watches someone else do it — is the only question that now matters.
Amsterdam. September 21–23. The next chapter starts now.
Next in the series: Innovation, Ecosystems & Real Outcomes — why the breakthroughs will come from ecosystems, not incumbents acting alone, and how CASA turns conversations into collaborations.
