If you found this article useful or valuable, subscribe (in the top-right corner of this page) and share. Let's spread the word and inspire more people to become passionate about OSS. Ryan is Passionate About OSS and has dedicated the last two decades to sharing his passion for OSS with the world. He is a founder, author, blogger, Engineer, connector and inquisitive learner about OSS and managing networks. To find out a little about his back-story and why he's so Passionate About OSS, click on the About Page. To connect with Ryan and the PAOSS team, click on the Contact page.
An updated call for innovation in the OSS industry We are currently living through a revolution for the OSS/BSS industry and the customers that we serve. It’s not a question of if we need to innovate, but by how much and in what ways. Change is surrounding us and impacting us in profound ways, triggered […]
The OSS we’ve been building for the last 30+ years aren’t too dissimilar to the digital twins the world is getting all excited by today. I find it really interesting, not just because of the buzz, but because the term “digital twin” seems to mean different things to different people. Having seen what OSS are […]
When people talk about the value of OSS data, the discussion invariably turns to privacy and some of the unconscionable things already done with our personal data. Off the top of my head, I can’t remember any telcos blatantly misusing the highly privileged information they have access to. This is possibly a double-edged sword. It […]
The broken watch analogy. When the second hand on your analog watch stops moving, you’ll quickly realise that your watch has broken. You’ll know exactly what to do next. You won’t assume that time is broken or is somehow standing still. You’ll immediately recognise that your watch needs fixing, re-winding or replacing. A watch is […]
I’m delighted to share with you that Houlihan Lokey, a global investment bank, has just launched the most comprehensive market analysis I’ve seen covering connectivity software including OSS / BSS. I’m possibly biased though as I’ve been lucky enough to have played a small part in its direction and content. Most of the reports that I’ve […]
Are you a dyed-in-the-wool telco person? Has your whole career, or a majority of it, been built around the telco industry? If your career in telco were to cease tomorrow, what would you do next? As we mentioned in our previous article on “Burning Platforms”, the orange curve of the traditional telco business is trending […]
I have a couple of really interesting videos to share with you today. I think they’re both brilliant, though perhaps I’m biased because they largely reinforce thoughts I already share with the stars of each video. Well, reinforce, but they also significantly expand the thinking with some enlightening dots that I hadn’t previously connected. Nobody […]
You may have noticed in a recent post that I’ve been contributing to the Transformation Project Framework (TPF) with TM Forum (document GB1011). It’s an important initiative that aims to help ease the stress and reduce the risk on complex OSS/BSS transformation projects. In conjunction with the TM Forum and the Transformation User Guide (TUG) […]
You’ve probably noticed the great tower sell-off trend that’s underway (see this article by Robert Clark as an example). Actually, I should call it the sell-off / lease-back trend because carriers are selling their towers, but leasing back space on the towers for their antennae, radio units, etc. Let’s look at this trend through the […]
I’m in the privileged position, probably as a result of founding The Blue Book OSS/BSS Vendor Directory, to speak with many vendors each week. It also means I’m lucky enough to watch in on product demos on a regular basis too. Last year DFG Consulting (www.dfgcon.si/en) reached out to tell me about their Interactively Assisted […]
I love this article by Tim Fiola, entitled “A Note to Management About the Network Automation Journey – It’s About Culture.” It does a brilliant job of explaining the real challenges around network automation. I’m going to riff off it a little bit today, drawing comparisons with OSS/BSS (which do happen to have a role […]
Report – The Most Exciting OSS/BSS Innovations of 2022
In collaboration with leading market analyst firm Omdia (part of the Informa Group), Passionate About OSS has just released a new (paid) report, titled Inventory of the future: flexible, scalable, and highly dynamic. The synopsis of the report is as follows: Inventory solutions are the linchpin of a network operator’s OSS, facilitating many different work and […]
We have a couple of exciting announcements to make today. The Transformation Project Framework (TPF) guidebook (GB1011) we’ve been working on with TM Forum has been launched with a pre-production status. That means it has passed peer review and is open for member comments. It’s still a work in progress, but you’ll see the basis […]
Back on my first OSS project – all the way back, deep into the annals of time – the year 2000 to be exact, I was lucky enough to work with a really tight delivery team. We all lived in the same hotel in Taiwan and took taxis to work together. Each morning I’d read […]
In our last article, we showed some examples of two exciting situation enrichment innovations, including the example below. These examples have the ability to provide really exciting ways to inform and communicate across different persona groups. Becoming more involved in AR/VR, digital twin and NFT / metaverse-style projects recently, I’m finding that there’s a lot […]
OSS have long been used to enrich operator experiences in many different ways. Raw alarms are cross-linked and enriched with inventory data to provide enhanced information (eg make/model, nearest neighbour, etc) to give operators in the NOC additional information to help them diagnose and repair. Inventory data is enriched with GIS / map data to […]
It’s said that the best way to sell hardware is to have compelling software and the best way to sell network services is to have compelling information to share. In the halcyon years for the telcos, they had both the network services and the singular mechanism for sharing compelling information. Voice / telephony was THE […]
There was a brilliant article from Matt Kapko over at SDXCentral last week entitled, “AWS Outage Stresses Telco Cloud Challenges.” It specifically highlighted lengthy outages on AWS in December and the downstream impact cloud outages can have for telcos that have dependencies on third-party cloud providers. “The benefits of public cloud are clear — efficiency, scalability, […]
If you work in an OSS/BSS product company, are you able to guess what percentage of your team spends time with clients (customer-facing)? And of that percentage, how many observe the end-user interacting with your products (user-facing)? There is a really important distinction between these two groups, not to mention the implication it has on […]
