It’s not the tech, it’s the timing
For those of us in the technology consulting game, we think we’re pretty clever at predicting the next big technology trend. But with the proliferation of information over the Internet, it’s not that difficult to see potentially beneficial technologies coming over the horizon. We can all see network virtualisation, Internet-connected sensor networks, artificial intelligence, etc […]
Falling off a cliff vs going to the sky
Have you noticed how the curves we’re dealing with in the service provider industry are either falling off a cliff (eg voice revenues) or going to the sky (eg theoretical exponential growth like IoE)? Here in the OSS industry, we’re stuck in the middle of these two trend curves too. Falling revenues mean reduced appetite […]
Comptel receives order from a Tier-1 in South America
Comptel Has Received a Significant Order from a Global Tier-1 Group Customer in South America. Comptel Has Received a Significant Order from a Global Tier-1 Group Customer in South America. The deal is a continuation of a long technology collaboration between the companies. This order is an expansion of Comptel’s Data Refinery solution. The value […]
Moving closer to the sale
“The definition of moving up the value chain will be different for freelancers depending on their industry. But in general, the closer you are to the sale, the higher you will be valued, and the more you can charge. For example, a content writer is just responsible for writing a certain number of blog posts […]
Wow
No, not “Wow!” the exclamation but the acronym W-O-W. Wow stands for Walk Out Working. In other words, if a customer comes into a retail store, they walk out with a working service rather than exasperation. Whilst many customers wouldn’t be aware of it, there are lots of things that have to happen in an […]
The modern OSS cycle – to build rather than buy
Have you noticed a changing trend where some of the largest service providers in the world are reverting to building their own OSS / orchestration (ie writing software) rather than buying off-the-shelf? The trends pushing this cycle are software defined networks and agile development models. In the earliest days of OSS, the service providers made […]
Software is eating the world…. and eating your job?
A funny thing happened today. I was looking for a reference to Marc Andreessen’s original, “software is eating the world,” quote and came across an article on TechCrunch that expressed many of the same thoughts I was going to write about. However, it doesn’t specifically cover the service provider and OSS industries so I’ll push […]
HPE to acquire SimpliVity
HPE to Acquire Hyperconverged Player SimpliVity for $650M. Hewlett Packard Enterprise ( NYSE : HPE ) announced a definitive agreement to acquire SimpliVity, a leading provider of software-defined, hyperconverged infrastructure, for $650 million in cash. The hyperconverged market was estimated to be approximately $2.4 billion in 2016, and is expected to grow at a compound […]
The first step on the path of simplification
The first step of simplification (exiting legacy), be it systems, processes, products, is to know who/what is still using the old thing. Are the users internal (eg admins), external (eg customers) or are the transactions M2M (machine-to-machine)? If M2M, which machines and what are the transactions? This information becomes important for change management (eg transition […]
Hot on the heels of ECOMP comes Indigo
Since releasing ECOMP (Enhanced control orchestration and management platform), AT&T has been busy on a data sharing environment, which it announced at the AT&T Developer Summit and is called Indigo. Like ECOMP, AT&T is looking to launch Indigo as an Open Source project through the Linux Foundation, hoping for community collaboration. As you all know, […]
How will IoT management platforms integrate with OSS/BSS?
There are clearly similarities and differences between OSS/BSS and IoT Management platforms. For example, you could consider each IoT device like any other network device in terms of the provision, manage and maintain process. The only problem is scale – you may have 100s/1000s of network devices, but could have 10,000s – 100,000s of IoT […]
The end of cloud computing
…. but we’ve only just started and we haven’t even got close to figuring out how to manage it yet (from an aggregated view I mean, not just within a single vendor platform)!! This article from Peter Levine of Andreesen Horowitz predicts “The end of cloud computing.” Now I’m not so sure that this headline […]
Amdocs works with Linux Foundation on OpenECOMP
Amdocs Joins Forces with Linux Foundation to Accelerate OpenECOMP Adoption in Open Source. Amdocs announced that it will partner with the Linux Foundation to accelerate the global adoption of the open source Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy (ECOMP) platform. Hosted by the Linux Foundation, this new project will make ECOMP open source available to […]
SK Telecom to invest incremental $9B, largely on platforms
SK Telecom has just announced a $9B incremental investment over the next 3 years. SK Telecom’s new CEO Park Jeong-ho told BusinessKorea that his company will invest $9 billion over the next three years in artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), autonomous vehicles, and 5G. Specifically, Jeong-ho said the company will spend $4.17 billion […]
Marc Andreessen’s platform play for OSS
Marc Andreessen describes platforms as “a system that can be programmed and therefore customized by outside developers — users — and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform’s original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate.” Platform thinking is an important approach for service providers […]
China Mobile Selects Nuage Networks SDN
China Mobile Selects Nuage Networks Software Defined Networking to Open New Era of Public Cloud. Nuage Networks, the Nokia venture focused on software-defined networking (SDN) solutions, announced that China Mobile (CMCC) has selected its Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) to implement CMCC’s first commercial public cloud project based on SDN technology. China Mobile is the largest […]
Procedures, supply chains, smart contracts and how they save costs
This week we’ve discussed standard operating procedures, dynamic / variable operating procedures and touched on how they impact a future supply / value chain that is far more digitised and potentially has far more actors involved (eg freelance resources). The digital trust mechanisms of blockchain open up opportunities for smart contracts to change the way […]
Working on the business rather than in the business of OSS
Blogs from the last two days have covered the dilemma of dynamic operating procedures and why the standard operating procedures of the past are perhaps too idealistic a concept. Despite this, I still try to build repeatability into the various aspects of OSS delivery – initial installation, documentation, demonstrations, training, testing (and regression testing), etc. […]
Standard Operating Procedures… or Variable Operating Procedures
Yesterday’s blog discussed the importance, but (perhaps) mythical concept of Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for service providers and their OSS / BSS. The number of variants, which I can only see amplifying into the future, makes it almost futile to try to implement SOPs. I say “almost futile” because SOPs are theoretically possible if the […]
Standard operating procedures… or are they?
Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) have been pivotal in codifying and standardising the use cases of service providers for many years. The theory goes that if you can standardise a process, then you can produce repeatably high quality and streamline it in a cycle of continual improvement. The repeatability objective is one* of two primary recollections […]