Open APIs

Suppose we have three product families: Residential broadband, Business broadband and ENNI/Ancillaries (the means of connecting to us to consume the first two).

We could have three Catalogs, one for each family, the pro being that each is smaller, so easier to work with internally. The con being that buyers would potentially need to make three requests of us when querying product availability.

Alternatively, we could represent those three families as individual Categories within one Catalog. The pro being buyers need only code requests to one Catalog, the con being that Catalog is now a much larger one for our team to manipulate.

Not sure there's a "right" answer here, but interested in others' feedback before we make a quite fundamental decision. Thanks!​

------------------------------
Paul Heritage-Redpath
CityFibre
------------------------------

Hi Paul

I can't give you real-life experience, but I will say that in Amdocs implementations of our commerce and ordering systems we always have only one catalog (at least within a single deployment).
Purely from an API model perspective, be aware that the underlying product catalog items (offering, specification, offering price) are not tied to one catalog. The same product offering (and I mean the actual same entity) can appear in multiple catalogs, if that's the way you choose to implement.

Categories are simply a means for organizing the catalog items in a convenient hierarchy, e.g. for searching or UI browsing (think Dewey Library Classification for an example).

Generally you need to consider why you might have multiple catalogs, for instance to support multiple sub-markets, or to separate between MNO and MVNOs, etc. I don't think your particular example justifies multiple catalogs, but that's just my opinion.

Hope it helps

------------------------------
Jonathan Goldberg
Amdocs Management Limited
Any opinions and statements made by me on this forum are purely personal, and do not necessarily reflect the position of the TM Forum or my employer.
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 11/27/2022 1:49:00 AM
From: Jonathan Goldberg
Subject: RE: TMF620 - Catalog vs Category - request for real life feedback

Hi Paul

I can't give you real-life experience, but I will say that in Amdocs implementations of our commerce and ordering systems we always have only one catalog (at least within a single deployment).
Purely from an API model perspective, be aware that the underlying product catalog items (offering, specification, offering price) are not tied to one catalog. The same product offering (and I mean the actual same entity) can appear in multiple catalogs, if that's the way you choose to implement.

Categories are simply a means for organizing the catalog items in a convenient hierarchy, e.g. for searching or UI browsing (think Dewey Library Classification for an example).

Generally you need to consider why you might have multiple catalogs, for instance to support multiple sub-markets, or to separate between MNO and MVNOs, etc. I don't think your particular example justifies multiple catalogs, but that's just my opinion.

Hope it helps

------------------------------
Jonathan Goldberg
Amdocs Management Limited
Any opinions and statements made by me on this forum are purely personal, and do not necessarily reflect the position of the TM Forum or my employer.
------------------------------