Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

Avoiding telco black swans: Insights from the airline industry

For many of us, telco network downtime is more of a nuisance than a critical event. But for some mission critical and life-critical use-cases (like e-Health scenarios), telecommunications networks are certainly not just nice-to-have. They have to be available for every second of every day of every year. It has recently dawned on me that there are a large proportion of Sev1s (severity 1 incidents that…

04/07/2023 No Comments

Two new products to help you kick-start your next OSS project

There's only one way that OSS and BSS can get better - clients need to invest in them, which in turn convinces vendors to invest in product development. There's a simple sequence of events: The demonstrable delivery of value by OSS to an organisation, which Justifies the allocation of budget to your organisation's OSS, and also Helps to provide the numbers to substantiate business cases for…

26/06/2023 No Comments

The OSS fireplace that is running out of heat

There's an old parable from Earl Nightingale that I think about every day in terms of the OSS industry and the business operations of Passionate About OSS. Earl was a motivational speaker and author known for his inspiring teachings. He gained prominence in the 1950s and continued his work until his passing in 1989. One of his famous parables is the story of the fireplace giving…

20/06/2023 No Comments

Network Resilience Engineering: The Role of Operational Support Systems (OSS)

Operational Support Systems (OSS) perform many business-critical functions for network operators, as shown in the diagram below. They are the connectors and the profit engine behind any communications network. As indicated above, the assurance flows help to retain revenues and customers. OSS are an insurance policy for a telco's brand, or at least the technology aspects of reputation and brand value. A major contributor to that…

15/06/2023 No Comments

The next OSS breakthrough: Accessibility

Our motto at Passionate About OSS is, "Removing complexity from OSS." Sadly, we're awash with complexity in our industry. If most OSS were represented as a board game, they'd look something like this: Image sourced from https://technabob.com Would you know how to play this game without instructions? Even if you had instructions, it could take many months to master. I almost wonder whether this is a…

08/06/2023 No Comments

The Apple Vision Pro is here: It’s an indicator to how immersive next-gen OSS/BSS will shape our connected futures

Yesterday's release of Apple's Vision Pro virtual reality headsets [actually, they're not quite here like the headline says yet - apparently they're becoming available in early 2024] provides just one more piece of evidence that our ways of interacting, communicating and working in telco are set for a transformative shift. Not just in telco, but with telco, across every industry. Yet, as astounding as these devices…

06/06/2023 No Comments

How the TowerCo carve-out model is inspiring new ways of thinking about old telco assets

In a recent blog series, we described the potential for OSS to help drive entirely new revenue / business-models that leverage the many strengths that telcos retain - Telco’s burning exchange moment – a playbook of fixes. Today's article will take a closer look at one of the ideas under Playbook #7 - They have real-estate in highly valuable locations - and how that could influence…

30/05/2023 No Comments

I’ve just been blown away again by another really revolutionary demonstration

Earlier in the week, I shared a really exciting video from EnterpriseWeb (in collaboration with KX and Microsoft in particular). Clearly others have been just as impressed with that video as I was. That one video alone has triggered a wave of discussions. I suspect that's because it provides a line-of-sight to what network operations might look like in the future. That line-of-sight includes: You can…

26/05/2023 No Comments

I’ve just been blown away by a really revolutionary demonstration

Over the last year, I’ve been assisting a consortium that includes a number of iconic brands such as Intel, RedHat, Fortinet, Keysight and TechMahindra. More importantly, those elements are underpinned by a powerful closed-loop engine formed by EnterpriseWeb and KX that stands up, observes and optimises a 5G RAN testbed. You can view the test-bed in action here - https://networkbuilders.intel.com/university/webcasts/extreme-automation-at-the-network-edge As you’ll see in the video…

23/05/2023 No Comments

An AR/VR product I’d love to develop. What are your thoughts?

As some of you will have spotted in past articles, I've spent the last couple of years working with solutions at the intersection of OSS/BSS (data) and AR/VR for visualisations and new ways of working. A couple of animated GIFs from that work are shown below. An interactive 3D model with assets identified from OSS / inventory data. An AR projection of a tower onto…

19/05/2023 No Comments

Crossing the Chasm: How to avoid flip-flopping between OSS products and services models

Are you familiar with Geoffrey Moore's famous, "Crossing the Chasm" concept from his book of the same name? It basically describes the large gap between early adoption of a product and getting it to mainstream utilisation. With the large amount of fragmentation in the OSS/BSS market, there are clearly many products that haven't been able to leap across to widespread utilisation yet. But that's not what…

19/05/2023 No Comments

From Idle Time to Deep Attention: The Impacts on Operational Support Systems

Of all technological advancements, smartphones have had one of the most profound impacts on humanity in recent history. They have ingeniously monetised "idle time," the brief intermissions between our important tasks, often filling our idle moments with a plethora of addictive apps, content and social media. However, as technology has evolved, these "idle time" tasks have addictively and increasingly encroached upon our dedicated attention spans, often…

16/05/2023 No Comments

Let us review your OSS product development backlog and I’ll predict if there’s growth in your future

In the last year, I've seen RFP responses worth an accumulated total of well over $1B for network services, systems and such. In almost every case, the carrier buyers have indicated that they're seeking innovative solutions. That's the outward-facing commentary at least. But the real, inward-facing story is that they're just seeking cost-reductions in most cases. In one example, I knew of a telco that issued…

08/05/2023 No Comments

A detailed account of the SolarWinds hack. A must-read story for all OSS/BSS suppliers

OSS solutions hold a privileged place in the operations of communications service providers around the world. They collect logs and events from network devices, security devices, shared services (like Active Directory) and other support systems. With increased automation and orchestration, they also have the power to quickly push controls back into all of those devices and systems. "With great power comes great responsibility" Wired has shared, The…

03/05/2023 No Comments

Graph Data Summit (Melbourne, 9th May 2023) – A presentation about telco network data modelling

When it comes to telco / OSS / BSS data, I'm a big believer in matching the type of database to the type of data you're handling. For alarms / events / logs, it's time-series databases, where KX is a stand-out. For network inventory-based use-cases, graph databases like Neo4j provide some significant advantages. If you're in Melbourne next Tuesday (9th of May, 2023), I'd like to invite you to…

02/05/2023 No Comments

Putting on the Big Black Hat: How Project Pre-Mortems can save your OSS Project before you begin

Have you ever heard of the concept of a project pre-mortem? Have you ever used the concept on one of your OSS projects? They can be a really useful technique to use prior to embarking on OSS projects. But what are they and how do you use them I can hear you asking. Think of it as projecting forward and you're doing a project post-mortem when…

26/04/2023 No Comments

Would you believe that 70+ personas and 700 use-cases is NOT a definitive list for OSS/BSS tools?

Have you ever stopped to wonder who actually uses OSS and BSS tools? Or how many role types (personas) do you think interact with OSS/BSS? Then, to go a step further, have you ever wondered what they do with their OSS and BSS tools? This was an itch we just had to scratch, so we decided to prepare a list of both, cross-linked, in one spreadsheet.…

17/04/2023 No Comments

The one person, two day, OSS challenge (The Friction Continuums)

For all of the OSS and BSS vendors out there, I'd like to issue you a challenge. Can one person who's not yet familiar with your solution (but has pre-requisite skills) set up your OSS / BSS product and demonstrate your product's most essential use-cases with their own data / configurations and then demo to colleagues within two days? [Speaking of use-cases, I've just put the…

14/04/2023 1 Comment

Telco’s burning exchange moment – a playbook of fixes

The previous article in this series, "Telecommunications has reached its burning exchange moment," highlighted that the current telco business model is at risk. It described how we could be experiencing an era of creative destruction of capital based on the works of Schumpeter and Marx. It also described: Poll results where nearly half of Europe's telco CEOs don't expect their businesses to make it through the…

11/04/2023 No Comments

Telecommunications has reached its burning exchange moment

I'll start this article with an apology - for crossing into the world of politics. An important basis of the discussion comes from the concept of creative destruction of capital and references quotes from Karl Marx. I have no interest in politics, especially historical politics, so I have little awareness of what the groundswell of feeling might be around this famous figure in human history. I…

05/04/2023 3 Comments

Crafting an Investment Memorandum (IM): A Comprehensive Guide

Are you an OSS and/or BSS supplier or telecommunications company that is thinking about seeking external investment or selling (in the sense of M&A [Mergers and Acquisitions], not the normal products and services you sell)? In recent years, we've been involved in an increased number of M&A projects, and I'm assuming this mirrors a rise in the amount of OSS/BSS M&A that's happening in the market…

04/04/2023 No Comments

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