Defective quality analysis

“Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort.” John Ruskin. The telco industry is well known for having a five nines (ie 99.999%) up-time engineering standard. That’s about 5 minutes of down-time per year. That’s pretty impressive, although granted it still leaves room for improvement. OSS are used to measure […]

NetworkMining and ALU deliver to TNB in Malaysia

Alcatel-Lucent Malaysia and NetworkMining sign cooperation agreement for APAC market. Alcatel-Lucent and Network Mining, an independent supplier of IP & optical network mediation software, today announces that Network Mining software has been deployed at Tenaga Nasional Berhad (“TNB”), the largest electricity utility in Malaysia and a leading utility company in Asia. The software will enable […]

The momentum spiral

“The world is wide, and I will not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum.” Frances E. Willard. As you all know already, OSS projects can be large, complex and cumbersome. Over the years, I’ve found so many different styles of inertia at play, some conspiratorial, but mostly related to […]

The enterprise OSS play

“…most of today’s open source companies license under an Apache software license (ASL), which lets the vendor decide whether to share code changes with the community or keep them as proprietary. Under this hybrid or dual-license, open source companies can charge for proprietary product extensions, and not just for services and support, accelerating revenue growth […]

Screen scraping in OSS

“…the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) is due to hear arguments from Ryanair and a Dutch price comparison business about the extent to which rules contained in the EU’s Database Directive apply to data that is not protected by copyright or a ‘sui generis’ database right. The CJEU’s judgment on the matter, which […]

Gartner releases OSS magic quadrant 2014

Gartner’s magic quadrant for OSS for 2014 can be downloaded from this link on Netcracker.com. Hat tips to James at www.OSSline.com for alerting us to this link.

Data integrity planning

“My current project is on data integrity where telco has number of bespoke inventory systems, systems acquired as part of M&As and COTS product. I am trying to put end to end story line in terms of process for data extraction, data investigation and analysis, data correction, impact on upstream and downstream systems. There can […]

The fishing continuum

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Chinese Proverb. This old proverb is oft quoted – to the point of being clichéd. It describes two ends of a fishing continuum that are used to analogise business situations like coaching […]

Wave Selects CSG

Wave Selects CSG for Comprehensive Customer Care and Billing Solution. CSG International announced that WaveDivision Holdings, LLC, a cable and broadband services company, has chosen CSG to provide a single unified billing solution across the enterprise. Under the terms of the new five-year agreement, CSG will deploy and manage a comprehensive billing solution for Wave […]

Go to the source

“The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.” Thomas Berger. Source data is often the bane of the data migrator. We go to all lengths to manipulate, cleanse, create and otherwise fix errors in the data. But sometimes it’s simpler than that. Sometimes we have the opportunity of going to […]

The OSS canary

“Life for an actual canary in a coal mine could be described in three words: “short but meaningful.” Early coal mines did not feature ventilation systems, so legend has it that miners would bring a caged canary into new coal seams. Canaries are especially sensitive to methane and carbon monoxide, which made them ideal for […]

Beware of side deals

“A shady business never yields a sunny life.” B. C. Forbes. Years ago I was assigned to advise the executive leadership team of a very large incumbent carrier on the installation of their first-ever OSS project. Prior to my arrival, they’d had a vendor selected for them that was not quite of their own choosing. […]

Completeness vs database efficiency

“Partitioning addresses key issues in supporting very large tables and indexes by letting you decompose them into smaller and more manageable pieces called partitions. SQL queries and DML statements do not need to be modified in order to access partitioned tables. However, after partitions are defined, DDL statements can access and manipulate individuals partitions rather […]

Centina Systems is No. 291 in Fast 500

Centina Systems Named One of the Fastest Growing Companies in North America on Deloitte’s 2014 Technology Fast 500. Centina Systems, a provider in strategic assurance analytics and network management solutions for communications service providers (CSPs) worldwide, today announced it ranked No. 291 on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500™, a ranking of the 500 fastest growing technology, […]

Exatel S.A. Chooses CSG

Exatel S.A. Chooses CSG Assure to Improve Voice Quality and the Customer Experience. Exatel S.A, one of the largest voice transit carriers in Poland, and CSG International announced that Exatel has chosen CSG Assure to boost the customer experience with improved quality of service. CSG Assure boasts one of the world’s largest test networks. It […]

3D cellular modelling

“* Traffic from wireless and mobile devices will exceed traffic from wired devices by 2016. * Global IP traffic has increased fivefold over the past 5 years, and will increase threefold over the next 5years. * Busy-hour (or the busiest 60?minute period in a day) Internet traffic increased 32 percent in 2013, compared with 25 […]

Optus signs massive deal with NetCracker

Optus Selects NetCracker and NEC for OSS Transformation Program NetCracker Technology and NEC Corp. announced that Optus, a wholly owned subsidiary of Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel) and an Australian leader in integrated telecommunications, delivering cutting-edge communications, information technology and entertainment services, has selected them to deliver a comprehensive, multi-phased upgrade program. Working with NetCracker and NEC […]

Fork me. Version rippling

“The quickest way to enter the fourth dimension is through an operation called Fork. A fork copies a three-dimensional repository, creating two equal but distinct repositories. A commit performed against one repository has no impact on the other, which means the codebases contained within will become more and more different, and eventually evolve into different […]

A drag and drop dream

“As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product.” Jef Raskin. A dream of mine since 2000, the days when Oracle forms were the user interface to the OSS I was using, was the ability to provide drag and drop provisioning of services / circuits. The dream was basically a rip-off of […]

OSS Market Research

“You already have zero privacy. Get over it.” Scott G. McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems Inc, stated back in 1999 believe it or not! Note that I’m not being flippant about privacy, but please read on. 🙂 Today’s blog is more of an open question to you dear readers, which follows on from the trailing […]