A first look at our new Network API research, previewed for members inside The Inner Circle — with the full report landing next month.
This began as a closed-door preview in The Inner Circle, the member-only forum where CPaaSAA members get early, unvarnished access to our research while it’s still taking shape. Here’s a taste of what came up.
A market waiting on itself
Two years ago, the open question about network APIs was whether anyone actually wanted them. The research suggests that was the wrong question — and still is.
Put a working solution in front of an enterprise and the answer is clear: yes, they want it, and it works. Fraud drops, identity checks get faster, outcomes improve. The evidence is there. But that is latent demand — the kind you only see when you go and show someone. It is not demand the market is generating on its own.
And here is the uncomfortable part. Awareness is patchy, and it thins the further you get from the network. Operators understand the capabilities they’re building; the channel — the partners, platforms and developers who would put them to work, and the business buyers who actually feel the pain they solve — is a long way from fluent. You can’t ask for what you can’t see.
So this isn’t supply politely waiting for demand, or demand waiting for supply. It’s a mismatch that feeds itself: supply stays cautious because real, paying demand hasn’t arrived — and that demand can’t arrive while the market is invisible to the people who would buy it, and illegible to the few who find it. Break that loop and the whole thing moves.
That is what the research is really about: where the loop is starting to break, and what it will take to break it faster.
What the research is finding
1. The bottleneck is language, not technology. Map the value chain and you find eleven distinct groups — operators, platforms, integrators, hyperscalers, gateways, industry bodies, regulators and more — each using the same words to mean different things. Ask three of them what a “developer” is and you’ll get three answers. The result is a game of Chinese whispers: opportunities that should connect simply don’t, because nobody can translate across the chain. The single highest-impact and most fixable issue in the entire market isn’t a technical gap. It’s that we keep selling APIs instead of the jobs they do.
2. There isn’t one network API market. There are three. Identity and fraud is where the real movement is — these services come off the operator’s IT estate, which makes them comparatively easy to expose and easy to prove. Location and connectivity management are genuinely promising, but they reach deeper into the network, cost more, and sometimes need 5G standalone to work at all. They’re earlier, and they behave differently. Treating “network APIs” as a single market is the first mistake almost everyone makes.
3. The numbers are a confidence game. Large forecasts exist, and we’d treat them with caution — almost no one is publishing real revenue yet. But the headline market number matters less as a fact than as a signal. It’s bait: it tells operators there’s enough at stake to be worth showing up for. The encouraging news is that the signals are starting to turn — more of the major markets are now genuinely in, and the core identity products are improving fast. The market is moving. It’s just patchy, and confidence has to build across the whole chain at once, not in one box at a time.
4. Standardisation isn’t the trump card it’s assumed to be. In some markets the operator’s own non-standard APIs already work — low latency, in production, trusted by the buyers using them. That raises an awkward question: why move to a standardised equivalent that can add latency or complexity for no immediate gain? At the same time, cheaper non-network alternatives are “good enough” for plenty of fraud and identity use cases, and buyers are already using them. Standardised network APIs have to win on outcome and economics — not on being standardised.
From APIs to outcomes
Here’s the thread running through all of it. The players gaining real traction aren’t the ones with the most APIs. They’re the ones who already sell an identity or fraud solution a buyer understands — and can quietly overlay a new capability into something that’s already priced, already trusted, already bought. They don’t have to manufacture demand. They attach to demand that already exists.
That’s the lesson CPaaSAA keeps coming back to. This market doesn’t grow by exposing more endpoints. It grows when the industry stops selling infrastructure and starts selling signals and solutions: named outcomes with a commercial wrap, not “do you want number verification, yes or no?”
The hard part was never building the API. The hard part is describing what it does in a language the buyer already speaks.
Our full Network API research lands next month, available first to CPaaSAA members. It maps the ecosystem, sets out a growth framework for reading where this market actually is — and where it’s going next.
If that’s a conversation you want to be inside, this is the moment to be a member.
My lifetime in IT and telecoms has been dedicated to innovation, building bridges and creating change. From the early days of cloud communications to working with operators on innovations and business development, and currently emphasizing APIs, CPaaS/CX and AI, my journey has been one of continuous evolution.
As founding partner at CPaaS Acceleration Alliance and The Next Cloud I'm privileged to help global telcos and techcos thrive in a fast changing world - through events, community building, strategy and global business development. I thrive on challenges and change, strategizing in cloud communications, and bringing people together for mutual success. Travel and continuous learning are my passions.
I believe the global communications industry is pivoting to prioritize customer experience and impactful solutions over mere technology and platforms, and we can tackle societal challenges by merging the strengths of corporates and innovators within new ecosystems.
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