The crossword analogy

“The nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is, you know there is a solution.” Stephen Sondheim. I won’t for one moment try to convince you that there is a single right answer to your OSS puzzle like there is for crosswords as Stephen Sondheim suggests. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are […]

Context sensitive help (CSH)

“We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves.” Galileo Galilei. When you’re a network operator who is following a workflow to do a particular task, it’s quite likely that you’ll use one or more tools in a suite that includes OSS, BSS, NMS, EMS and more. Of the workflows […]

Sri Lanka Telecom upgrades to NetCracker

Sri Lanka Telecom Upgrades to NetCracker’s Digital Business Platform. NetCracker Technology announced that Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT) has chosen to upgrade its existing NetCracker billing and mediation environment to NetCracker’s next-generation billing, rating and active mediation solutions. Sri Lanka Telecom is Sri Lanka’s national ICT solutions provider and leading broadband and backbone infrastructure service provider. […]

Sprint chooses ItsOn

Sprint to Use ItsOn Smart Services Platform. ItsOn Inc. announced that Sprint will use the ItsOn Smart Services Platform to enhance Sprint’s mobile network capabilities and enable new types of mobile services. The multi-year agreement provides Sprint with the ability to design and implement granular service policy control for various data, text and voice services […]

Dashboard control

“I can see paradise by the dashboard light.” Meatloaf. Whether it is dashboards, views or reports, there are two main styles: Canned – ie presentations of data that have been pre-configured by you or your application administrators Ad-hoc – ie presentations of data that you build on an as-needed basis And in the case of […]

Management link cutover

“I’ve always believed there are moments in our lives which can be defined as a transition between the before and after, between the cause and the effect.” Benjamin X. Wretlind. Many of you will be familiar with the after-hours or overnight cutovers where you make changes to your organisation’s infrastructure (eg applications, servers, networks, etc) […]

Telefónica Selects Amdocs in Chile and Peru

Telefónica Selects Amdocs Products and Services for Quad-Play Transformation in Chile and Peru. Amdocs announced that Telefónica, one of the world’s leading service providers with more than 313 million customers across Latin America and Europe, has selected Amdocs for transformation projects in Chile and Peru. By modernizing and standardizing Telefónica’s business support systems (BSS) on […]

Zain Kuwait Selects IBM

Zain Kuwait Selects IBM Social Software to Enhance Customer Digital Experience. IBM announced that Zain, the pioneer of mobile telecommunications in Kuwait, has chosen IBM’s social software to deliver deeper, more personalized experiences for its 2.5 million customers in the country. The IBM solution brings together Zain’s digital, mobile and social platforms to offer customers […]

Are you asking the right questions?

“Big data is currently at the peak of the hype curve, and while service providers can collect more data than ever from many different sources they don’t always know what to do with it. Valuable insights are often missed simply because they aren’t asking the right questions of the right data to generate useful intelligence.” […]

Sweating the OSS vendor

“No matter how good you are at planning, the pressure never goes away. So I don’t fight it. I feed off it. I turn pressure into motivation to do my best.” Benjamin Carson. Over the years, I’ve seen many a customer put pressure on the vendor (ie sweat the vendor) to do tasks that aren’t […]

Huawei separates OSS from Managed Services

Huawei Launches OSS Solution independently from Managed Services. Huawei announced that its Operations Support System (OSS) solution is commercially available to all service providers. As the OSS was previously only available as part of Huawei’s Managed Services, the extended availability of the solution further strengthens Huawei’s service portfolio and the company’s position as a global […]

How to make your APIs better

“APIs are everywhere today and can be a great building block of modern applications. But all too often APIs are not truly great. Rather than love your API, developers curse it.” John Musser in relation to this slide deck. Yesterday’s post was about the importance of having an API that’s easy to integrate with for […]

NetCracker transforms Turk Telecom BSS

NetCracker Next-Generation Revenue Management Solution Rapidly Transforms BSS for Turk Telecom. NetCracker Technology announced that Turk Telecom has completed a major BSS transformation in just seven months utilizing NetCracker’s next-generation Revenue Management solution as its strategic platform for service enablement and systems consolidation. Turk Telecom is Turkey’s leading communications provider. This BSS transformation, supporting Turk […]

Comptel integrates with Smallworld

Comptel Integrates GE’s Inventory Software Solutions to Streamline Telecom Service Fulfilment. Comptel Corporation and GE announced that they have joined forces to help communications service providers (CSPs) federate access to the large amount of data split across physical and logical inventory systems. By enabling service orchestration to reach beyond logical inventory, operators can ensure reliable, […]

Does your API open doors?

“Remember: An API is a journey, not a destination” John Musser in this slide-deck entitled “Ten Reasons Developers Hate Your API“. API (Application Programming Interface) are the mechanisms for getting data into and out of your OSS. Since an OSS doesn’t do anything useful without data, APIs are effectively the life-blood of an OSS. Yet, […]

MTN Selects CSG International

MTN Selects CSG for Comprehensive Managed Services Program. CSG International announced that MTN, one of the largest communication service providers in the world, has selected CSG for a long-term managed services engagement that will enable MTN South Africa to simplify and streamline its operations and focus its resources on core business lines. Under the terms […]

The components of SDN, NFV, MANO & OSS

When you curate a website / blog called PassionateAboutOSS, it’s pretty obvious that you would see the world through OSS-tinted glasses. The tech-world at least. And so it has been for me when evaluating new comms network / service concepts like SDN / NFV. It’s been a case of, “that all sounds really exciting and […]

The marriage analogy

“Don’t marry the person you think you can live with; marry only the individual you think you can’t live without.” James C. Dobson. A reader recently asked a great question about vendor lock-in. OSS tend to be very sticky (ie it’s very hard to change suppliers once an OctopOSS’s tentacles have spread throughout the CSP’s operations) so […]

Interruption is the enemy of productivity

“Interruption is the enemy of productivity.” Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson in Rework. OctopOSS are tightly entangled beasts. There are so many complexities that collaboration with your fellow project members is essential. But too many OSS projects get bogged down due to different forms of communications – meetings, documentation, conferences, chatting with colleagues and […]

What got you here…

“When times get confusing, it’s easy to revert to the habits that got you here. More often than not, that’s precisely the wrong approach. The very thing that got you here is the thing that everyone who’s here is doing, and if that’s what it took to get to the next level, no one would […]