Crossing the OSS chasm

Geoff Moore’s seminal book, “Crossing the Chasm,” described the psychological chasm between early buyers and the mainstream market. Seth Godin cites Moore’s work, “Moore’s Crossing the Chasm helped marketers see that while innovation was the tool to reach the small group of early adopters and opinion leaders, it was insufficient to reach the masses. Because […]

Diamonds are Forever and so is OSS OPEX

Sourced from: www.couponraja.in I sometimes wonder whether OPEX is underestimated when considering OSS investments, or at least some facets (sorry, awful pun there!) of it. Cost-out (aka head-count reduction) seems to be the most prominent OSS business case justification lever. So that’s clearly not underestimated. And the move to cloud is also an OPEX play […]

A billion dollar bid

A few years ago I was lucky enough to be invited to lead a bid. I say lucky because the partner organisations are two of the most iconic firms in the tech industry. The bid was for bleeding-edge work, potentially worth well over a billion dollars. I was a little surprised to be honest. I […]

Inventory Management re-states its case

In a post last week we posed the question on whether Inventory Management still retains relevance. A friend recently posited that inventory tools are no longer relevant.   I see where he’s coming from but also tend to disagree (but with an open mind). IMHO There are certainly uses cases where inventory remains unquestionably needed. […]

When OSS experts are wrong

“When experts are wrong, it’s often because they’re experts on an earlier version of the world.” Paul Graham.   OSS experts are often wrong. Not only because of the “earlier version of the world” paradigm mentioned above, but also the “parallel worlds” paradigm that’s not explicitly mentioned. That is, they may be experts on one […]

Google’s Circular Economy in OSS

OSS wear many hats and help many different functions within an organisation. One function that OSS assists might be surprising to some people – the CFO / Accounting function. The traditional service provider business model tends to be CAPEX-heavy, with significant investment required on physical infrastructure. Since assets need to be depreciated and life-cycle managed, […]

Another OSS “forehead-slap” moment!

I don’t know about you, but I find this industry of ours has a remarkable ability to keep us humble. Barely a day goes by when I don’t have to slap my forehead and say, “uhhh…. of course!” (or perhaps, “D’oh!!”) I had one such instance yesterday. I couldn’t figure out why a client’s telemetry […]

Over 30 Autonomous Networking User Stories

The following is a set of user stories I’ve provided to TM Forum to help with their current Autonomous Networking initiative. They’re just an initial discussion point for others to riff off. We’d love to get your comments, additions and recommended refinements too. As a Head of Network Operations, I want to Automatically maintain the […]

New OSS product – Restoration Manager

At Passionate About OSS, we’re lucky enough to count the utilities market as an important part of our client base. This probably puts us in a very small percentage of OSS exponents that work across OSS for telco and utilities. Utilities have a number of interesting and unique nuances compared with other OSS markets. Starting […]

H-OSS-ton, we have a problem

You’ve all probably seen this scene from the Tom Hanks movie, Apollo 13 right? But you’re probably wondering what it has to do with OSS? Well, this scene came to mind when I was preparing a list of user stories required to facilitate Autonomous Networking. More specifically, to the use-case where we want the Autonomous […]

I was wrong. Forget about investing in your OSS UI

I must’ve written dozens of posts about us needing to collectively invest a lot more effort into UI / UX. I’ve written quite a few over the last few months especially. This one in particular springs to mind. As an industry, we typically don’t do user experience journeys (UX) or user interfaces (UI) very well […]

We use time-stamping in OSS, but what about geo-stamping?

A slightly left-field thought dawned on me the other day and I’d like to hear your thoughts on it. We all know that almost all telemetry coming out of our networks is time-stamped. Events, syslogs, metrics, etc. That makes perfect sense because we look for time-based ripple-out effects when trying to diagnose issues. But therefore […]

The Autonomous Network / OSS Clock

In yesterday’s post, we talked about what needs to happen for a network operator to build an autonomous network. Many of the factors extended beyond the direct control of the OSS stack. We also looked at the difference between designing network autonomy for an existing OSS versus a ground-up build of an autonomous network. We […]

As a network owner….

….I want to make my network so observable, reliable, predictable and repeatable that I don’t need anyone to operate it. That’s clearly a highly ambitious goal. Probably even unachievable if we say it doesn’t need anyone to run it. But I wonder whether this has to be the starting point we take on behalf of […]

For those starting out in OSS product, here’s a tip

“For those starting out in product, here’s a tip: Design, Defaults*, Documentation, Details and Delivery really matter in software.”Jeetu Patel here. * Note that you can interpret “Defaults” to be Out-Of-The-Box functionality offered by the product. Let’s break those 5 D-words down and describe why they really matter to the OSS industry shall we? Design […]

Net Simplicity Score (NSS) gets a little more complex

In last Tuesday’s post, I asked the community here on PAOSS and on TM Forum’s Engage platform for ideas about how you would benchmark complexity. I also provided a reference to an old post that described the concept of a NSS (Net Simplicity Score) for our OSS/BSS. Due to the complexity of factors that contribute to […]

OSS are not just a #$%&ing cost centre

It seems that OSS/BSS are always an afterthought. And always seen as a cost centre rather than a revenue generator. Now I’m biased of course, but I think that’s such a narrow view. And we need everyone in our industry to spread the same gospel.  I like to think of it like this… Sales teams […]

Opinions wanted – How to Benchmark OSS/BSS complexity

I’d love to ask you an important question…  how do we benchmark OSS/BSS complexity? To measure how complex our systems are and therefore provide a signpost for simplification. A colleague has opined that the number of apps in a stack could be used a proxy. I can see where he’s going with that, but I […]

The digital transformation paradox twins

There’s an old adage that “the confused mind always says no.” Consider this from your own perspective. If you’re in a state of confusion about something, are you likely to commit wholeheartedly or will you look to delay / procrastinate? The paradox for digital transformation is that our projects are almost always complex, but complexity […]

What will get your CEO fired? (part 4)

In Monday’s article, we suggested that the three technical factors that could get the big boss fired are probably only limited to: Repeated and/or catastrophic failure (of network, systems, etc) Inability to serve the market (eg offerings, capacity, etc) Inability to operate network assets profitably In that article, we looked closely at a human factor […]