AT&T (T) is hosting its inaugural Partner Exchange conference this week in Dallas, where the discussion has centered on the application programming interfaces (APIs) that are changing the game in customer account management.

Partner Exchange, the incubator-style group within AT&T created just two years ago to take advantage of the convergence between telecom and IT, has put an emphasis on “speed and getting it right the first time,” said Brooks McCorcle, president of AT&T’s Emerging Business Markets. With that in mind, the group, which carries a startup attitude and has an affinity for wearing jeans, has built a collection of APIs that can take a customer order from quote to service provisioning in less than half the time it traditionally takes.

“We’ve enabled a more than 50 percent reduction in cycle times because of APIs,” said Jason Porter, vice president, Solutions Development and Business Operations. “Quoting, ordering, service assurance, billing—it’s all transparent. We have transformed the pace at which we do business so you can get your quote to cash much faster.”

To illustrate how transformative, Porter and others highlighted (often) how getting a simple quote often would take a week or more. With the APIs, that time has been reduced to mere minutes.

“Early on we knew we needed to change cycle times and become open. We heard quickly from our partners that we were slow and hard to do business with. So we started looking for a solution to that,” Porter noted. “We didn‘t know it was going to be APIs but we knew we needed to transform. I would say mid-year last year is when we crystalized a vision to open an API platform. So we started in January this year and launched it in July.”

Fred Barilotti, executive director of Mt. Laurel, New Jersey-based solution provider Ancero, noted the APIs were the reason why his company joined Partner Exchange.

“It was a manually driven industry and most of challenges were because of it being a manually driven industry,” he said. “Now that we see we can perform quicker results, our presentations are more robust and customers are moving quickly.”

Phil Towle, senior vice president of Sales at Alliant Technologies, an IT services infrastructure provider based in Morristown, New Jersey, also noted the APIs set AT&T apart from its competitors.

“We’ve had other telco companies contacting us about reselling their services but we’ve not accepted any meetings because we enjoy being exclusive with AT&T and they are so far down the road compared to other companies,” he said.

Porter noted the API ecosystem is in early days, but so far it has seen much customer success. Next on the list: enabling the APIs in a mobile environment.

“We are going to build the API platform for mobility next, to provide an API-enabled mobility experience,” he said. “Today partners order through our web portal and get information and make changes to plans, etc. With APIs, they can access that same information on their mobile device so they can do their job better and create value.”

Also on tap is integration with the Salesforce.com (CRM) platform for an even more seamless customer relationship experience. AT&T expects the capabilities to come online in the next few months.

The APIs are “truly changing how we do business,” McCorcle said. “As we roll it out we see solution providers using it as a key tool in their toolbox. It totally changes the speed at which we do business.”