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With the holiday period looming for many of us, we will have the head-space to reflect – on the year(s) gone and to ponder the one(s) upcoming. I’d like to pose the rhetorical question, “What do you expect to reflect on?” It’s probably safe to say that a majority of OSS experts are engaged in […]
“There’s some things that I’ve challenged my team to do. We have to be faster than the web scale players and that sounds audacious. I tell them you can’t you can’t go to the bus station and catch a bus that’s already left the station by getting on a bus. We have to be faster […]
Enhanced OSS Suite Will Help HTC Roll Out Digital Services Faster and Support Increasing Diversity of Devices. Netcracker Technology announced that Horry Telephone Cooperative (HTC) will extend and upgrade its use of Netcracker’s OSS to the latest Netcracker 12 suite. Leveraging Netcracker 12 will enable HTC to roll out digital services more quickly and utilize […]
Over the last couple of posts, we’ve referred to the following diagram and its ability to create a glass ceiling on OSS feature releases: Yesterday’s post indicated that the current proliferation of microservices has the potential to amplify the strangulation. So how does that compare with the previous approach that was built around COTS (Commercial off-the-shelf) […]
Openet’s Digital as a Service solution selected by Tier 1 North American operator to power Digital First Sub-brand. Openet announced that it has entered a partnership with a Tier 1 North American operator to provide its Digital as a Service solution. This solution comprises integrated best of breed solutions that will combine to deliver an […]
Netcracker’s OSS Suite to Support GVA’s Rapid Network Expansion, Market Growth and Service Diversity. Netcracker Technology announced that its OSS suite was selected and deployed to support the long-term growth strategy of Group Vivendi Africa (GVA). GVA is a newly formed affiliate of the French-based multinational conglomerate Vivendi with the goal to deploy and operate […]
Yesterday’s post spoke of how the accumulation of features was limiting us to small, incremental change. The diagram below re-tells that story: You’ve probably noticed that microservices are the big buzz in our industry. They’re perceived as being the big white hope for our future. I have my reservations though. If you’re at t0 in […]
The diagram below provides a time-sequence view of how tech-debt accumulation eventually strangles new OSS feature releases unless the drastic measures described are taken. At start-up (t0), the system is brand new and has no legacy to maintain, so all effort can be dedicated to delivering new features (or products) as well as testing to […]
Have you ever noticed that the biographies of almost every successful person contains the chapter(s) where everything goes disastrously? It seems inevitable that there are periods in our careers where things don’t go right, no matter how successful you are. Interestingly my least successful project was also one that had only a very small OSS […]
“Startups win with data. Mammoths go extinct with products.” Jay Sharma. Interesting phraseology. I love the play on words with the term mammoths. There are some telcos that are mammoth in size but are threatened with extinction though changes in environment and new competitors appearing. I tend to agree with the intent of the quote, […]
Seasonality is an important factor for network and service assurance. It’s also known as time-of-day/week/month/year specific activity. For example, we often monitor network health through the analysis of performance metrics (eg CPU utilisation) and set up thresholds to alert us if those metrics go above (or below) certain levels. The most basic threshold is a […]
Eric Ries’ “The Lean Startup,” has a short chapter entitled, “Get out of the Building.” It basically describes getting away from your screen – away from reading market research, white papers, your business plan, your code, etc – and out into customer-land. Out of your comfort zone and into a world of primary research that extends beyond […]
Are your OSS better today than they were 5 years ago? (or 10, 15, 20 years depending on how long you’ve been in the industry) Your immediate reaction to this question is probably going to be, “Yes!” After all, you and your peers have put so much effort into your OSS in the last 5 […]
Gee time has a habit of getting away from me. TM Forum Live! Asia started today in Singapore. AI has been the big topic of discussion on Day 1. Give me a shout-out if you’re there!
Omnichannel will remain full of holes until we figure out a way of tracking user journeys rather than trying to prescribe (design, document, maintain) process flows. As a customer jumps between the various channels, they move between systems. In doing so, we tend to lose the ability to watch customer’s journey as a single continuous […]
My wife and I attended a Christmas party over the weekend and on the trip home we discussed customer service. In particular we were discussing the customer service training she’d had, as well as the culture of customer service reinforcement she’d experienced via leaders and peers in her industry. She doesn’t work in ICT or […]
Earlier in the week, we spoke about the differences between dirty and clean consulting, as posed by Dr Richard Claydon, and how it impacted the use of consultants on OSS projects. The same clean / dirty construct applies to automation projects / tools such as RPA (Robotic Process Automation). Clean Automation = simply building robotic […]
Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal, Founders Fund and many other snippets in an impressive highlights reel) asks prospective entrepreneurs to tell him something they believe is true that nobody agrees with them about. Today I’m asking you the same question and would love to hear your answers: What do you believe to be true in […]
“Corporate innovation is far more dependent on external collaboration and customer insight than having a ‘lab’.” Andy Howard in a fabulous LinkedIn post. Like so many other industries, OSS is ripe for disruption through innovation. Andy Howard’s post provides a number of sobering statistics for any large OSS vendors thinking of embarking on an Innovation […]
“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” Bill Gates. The pervading OSS business case paradigm is to seek cost-out by introducing automation that reduces head-count – […]
