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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 […]
When it comes to driving efficiency and profitability in a service provider’s business, I feel there are three key pillars to consider (aside from strategic factors of course), as follows: The IT stack, led by the OSS/BSS The networks and The field services The networks are vital. They are effectively each organisation’s product because connectivity […]
The OSS / BSS industry tends to be quite technical in nature. The networks we manage are technical. The IT stacks we build on are technical. The workflows we design are technical. The product offerings we coordinate are technical. As such, the innovations we tend to propose are quite technical too. In some cases, too […]
Selecting a new OSS / BSS product, vendor or integrator for your transformation project can be an arduous assignment. Every network operator and every project has a unique set of needs. Counter to that, there are literally hundreds of vendors creating an even larger number of products to service those widely varied sets of needs. […]
I’ve recently been co-opted to lead the development of an “Inventory of the Future” transformation guide on behalf of TM Forum and thought you, the readers, might have some interesting feedback to contribute. I had previously prepared an “Inventory of the Future” discussion paper prior to being invited into the TMF discussions about a month […]
We’re excited to announce that we’ve just launched the eBook version of Mastering Your OSS. Click on the link above or here to read all about it.
