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Ep 15 – Totogi: The new ant at the picnic
Remember the David-and-Goliath business story of Siebel vs Salesforce? There’s a new public cloud startup in Telco that will change everything – webscale charging engine Totogi.
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Ep 30 – What’s up with Totogi? Achieving Feature Velocity with the Totogi APIs
This is the second episode in our What’s Up with Totogi? series, where I share the inside scoop on Totogi news and features.
For newcomers, Totogi is a telco enterprise software solution that is 100% built on the public cloud, which means its best-in-class technology can be delivered at a super affordable price. Telcos of all sizes should be developing with it TODAY.
For this episode, I sat down with my buddy David Haselwood to talk about how Totogi APIs can help CSPs bring new features to market in days and weeks (rather than months and years), and boost customer satisfaction and ARPU in the process.
Listen to our conversation about:
- Why Totogi’s API-first approach is a gamechanger for the telco industry [4:02];
- How Totogi APIs work with – and not against – your current systems [10:25];
- How a single API integration can help telcos offer premium content and services from top-tier providers like Netflix, Apple, and Expedia [12:36];
- How Totogi APIs empower teams to innovate faster and better, and at a lower cost [14:58].
You may remember David Haselwood from our #SaveMWC episode.
It’s a fun one, so listen to it when you’re done with this one. And don’t forget to check out the first What’s Up with Totogi podcast, too.
Links and Resources
- You can find the transcript for this episode here.
- Set up a meeting with the Totogi team
- Sign up for a preview to the Totogi APIs
- Check out the on-demand version of our Totogi API live-coding workshop where we code up a new feature in less than 30 minutes
- Here’s an example of the code snippets needed to share Marketplace offers with your subscribers – couldn’t be easier!
- Watch the video that telco industry dinosaurs petitioned to pull off of TM Forum’s DTWS website
- Read this article by Keith Dyer of The Mobile Network about our banned video and the Streisand effect
- If you don’t know about the API platform companies Twilio and Stripe, check out their websites to learn more
- Get the full story about how Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax” became a mega hit, then watch the official music video
- Speaking of velocity, remember that movie Terminal Velocity with Charlie Sheen? Maybe watching this movie will get your blood pumping about moving to the public cloud!
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The Telco in 20 podcast won a 2022 Gold Hermes Award and was recognized on Forrester’s 2021 list of the Top 100 Channel Podcasts and Feedspot’s Top 10 Telecom Podcasts list.
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Podcast Credits
- Executive Producer and Host: Danielle Rios Royston, TelcoDR
- Executive Producer: Kristin Donelson, OneLouder Marketing
- Senior Producer: Lindsay Grubb, TillCo Media
- Editor/Producer: Alisa Jenkins Wilson, Springboard Marketing
- Audio Editing: Andrew Condell
- Music: Dyami Wilson
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Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is “feature velocity” and why does it matter for telcos?
Feature velocity is the ability to get new ideas and capabilities to market in days or weeks rather than months or years. Danielle Rios coined the term to describe the speed advantage CSPs can gain by building with APIs instead of traditional BSS implementations. In an industry where OTT players like Amazon, Apple, and Netflix move fast and command NPS scores in the 60s and 70s—compared to telco’s average of ~30—speed to market is increasingly a competitive necessity.
2. How do the Totogi APIs work with a telco’s existing systems?
Totogi APIs don’t require CSPs to rip and replace their current BSS. As long as there’s a “hook” into an existing system—whether it’s Ericsson, Amdocs, CSG, or another platform—the APIs can call out to the public cloud, perform a function, and return results. One example from the episode: a CSP using Ericsson’s BSS was able to use Totogi APIs and AWS Step Functions to detect and flag provisioning errors that had been causing customer complaints. No system swap required.
3. What’s an example of how quickly a telco can add a new service with Totogi APIs?
In one real-world example, Tier 2 and Tier 3 telcos have used Totogi Marketplace to offer premium content partnerships—like Apple TV or HBO Max—with just four lines of code. Normally, signing partner agreements and updating systems to provision new offers takes months. Totogi’s 90+ pre-built Marketplace partnerships eliminate that process entirely, letting CSPs go from idea to live offer in weeks instead of quarters.
4. How are Totogi APIs priced differently from traditional BSS vendors?
Traditional BSS vendors typically charge based on subscriber count plus large upfront licensing fees. Totogi APIs use a pay-per-call model—similar to Twilio or Stripe—so CSPs pay for only what they actually use. A low-frequency IoT device that checks in once a day costs almost nothing; a high-usage mobile subscriber generates more calls and pays more. There are no perpetual licenses, no big implementation costs, and no years-long upgrade cycles.
5. How did Danielle Royston describe the inspiration behind Totogi’s API-first approach?
DR drew direct inspiration from Twilio and Stripe—two companies that dramatically simplified communications and payments for developers. She asked whether the same API-first model could work for telco BSS functionality. The answer was yes. Rather than designing screens and workflows first, Totogi starts with the API: define the functionality, expose it as a clean interface, and let developers inside CSPs build what they need—fast, cheaply, and iteratively.
6. Can telco developers actually start building with Totogi APIs today?
Yes. CSP developers can sign up for a preview of the Totogi APIs and start experimenting immediately—no hardware procurement, no months of scoping. Because Totogi is built entirely on the public cloud, developers get built-in compute, databases, resilience, and elasticity from day one. The team also offers a live-coding workshop on demand that demonstrates adding a new feature in under 30 minutes. This has generated significant interest from telcos exploring the platform.