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Clarity assets sold and placed into administration

Clarity assets sold and subsequently placed into administration. Following an announcement to the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) on 24 June 2014 that Clarity OSS Limited and its secured creditor (CPS Group Investments Pty Ltd) had entered into an agreement to sell most of the Clarity Group's assets to the Australian subsidiary of a US quoted corporation, this sale was finalised on 3 July 2014. On 4…

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08/07/2014 No Comments

Reconciling services

"If there is to be reconciliation, first there must be truth." Timothy B. Tyson. There are two main categories of billing: Metering Charging In the case of metering, this is the measurement of actual usage of communication services. An example would be the flagfall upon setup of a telephone call and an additional cost per second/minute that the phone conversation lasts. Metering statistics are derived from…

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08/07/2014 No Comments

Getting your OSS humming

"Action and reaction, ebb and flow, trial and error, change - this is the rhythm of living." Bruce Barton. I have a really left-field idea to run past you today. I'd love your thoughts about its feasibility (or lack of!). During a major incident (eg alarm storm, security attack, etc) your network health visualisation tools tend to clog up... the scrolling screen of death... where too…

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07/07/2014 No Comments

More models than critics

"Children have more need of models than of critics." Carolyn Coats. OSS covers a huge range of skills, activities, domains, business functions, etc. I've met some absolute geniuses in the field of OSS, but I've never met someone who is a genius at every aspect. As such, I'd like to tweak Carolyn Coats's comments thus, "OSS exponents have more need of models than of critics." It's…

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06/07/2014 No Comments

Failing without being a failure

"Never walk away from failure. On the contrary, study it carefully and imaginatively for its hidden assets." Michael Korda. Working on OctopOSS projects can be a humbling experience. There are so many tentacles that can whack you and your colleagues over the back of the head. Every project seems to have its own tentacles. Sometimes it's only small elements of a project that fail and can…

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05/07/2014 No Comments

Elitecore signs 3 new orders

Elitecore bags 3 new orders from Multi Service Cable Operators, Deploys Integrated Real time Billing, Charging & Policy Control Solution. Elitecore Technologies, a leading provider of Integrated Policy, Charging, Billing and Revenue Management solution announces three Cable MSOs (Multi-System Operators) wins for Pay TV and Broadband services; setting up a strong footprint in Asia Pacific Cable market. Elitecore will offer a complete pre-integrated as well as…

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04/07/2014 No Comments

Productising your interfaces

"In the struggle between capital and labor, more often than not capital has won, because the real source of value for most companies has historically been the hard assets that they owned and controlled." James Surowiecki. Yesterday we spoke of the different types of interface "objects" such as probes, robots, MDDs (Mediation Device Drivers), etc and how they are developed to interface with data sources such…

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04/07/2014 No Comments

Allstream selects NetCracker

Allstream Transforms Service Layer with NetCracker. NetCracker Technology announced that Allstream, Canada’s all-business communications provider, has agreed to transform its end-to-end order management and service fulfillment capabilities using its comprehensive next-gen innovative NetCracker 9 suite. Allstream is a Canadian leader in IP communications and the only national communications provider that works exclusively with business customers of all sizes with a coast-to-coast national IP fiber network. This…

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03/07/2014 No Comments

NetBoss acquires Ventraq Business Analytics

NetBoss Technologies Announces Ventraq Acquisition. NetBoss Technologies, Inc. has announced that it has acquired the Ventraq Business Analytics (BIAS) technology assets, product portfolio and associated intellectual property, in addition to assuming the existing customer base, support, and maintenance responsibilities from Ventraq, Inc., an innovative provider of large-scale data integration, network and business analytics, and personalization solutions for communication service providers (CSPs) and large enterprises. The BIAS…

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03/07/2014 No Comments

Interface Requirement Specifications (IRS)

"I have discovered that there are two types of command interfaces in the world of computing: good interfaces and user interfaces." Daniel J. Bernstein. OSS don't add much value in isolation. They need to get data from somewhere and then add value to that data to turn it into insight. Of course they get some data from manual input, but most of their data come from…

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03/07/2014 No Comments

Deploy Partners aligns with OSS Integrators

DeployPartners alliance with OSS Integrators. DeployPartners will be entering into a strategic alliance with USA Service Assurance Solution provider OSS Integrators in the near future. The merge of DeployPartners and OSS Integrators will enable both companies to benefit from each others experience and skills resulting in our customers getting the benefit of a wider set of solutions and product knowledge. ?About DeployPartners: DeployPartners deliver high-quality Service…

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03/07/2014 No Comments

Ring-fencing a sandpit

"I've failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed." Michael Jordan. Regular readers of this blog will have recollections of previous discussions about setting up a sandpit environment for customers. A couple of examples are here (building sandcastles) and here (lose your fear in a sandpit). There a few different ways that this can be achieved: Building a dedicated physical trial…

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02/07/2014 No Comments

NBN selects Comptel

Comptel Receives a Significant Order from Australian NBN Co for Comptel Fulfillment. Comptel has received a significant order from its Australian customer NBN Co for Comptel Fulfillment. The deal exceeds 1.3 million euros and consists of software licenses and services. This is an extension for the deal made in 2011.

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01/07/2014 No Comments

Disadvantages of exposing your API

"Just like any product, an open API needs a business justification, user personas, clear use cases, a roadmap, a revenue model, a pre- and post-launch plan, and specific needs in the areas of marketing, sales, support, documentation, and security. These needs are completely separate from those of your core product, though they should be strategically consistent. In fact, it’s not unusual for companies to assign a…

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01/07/2014 No Comments

Advantages of exposing your API

"In today’s cloud computing world, many Product Managers will be faced with the decision of whether to open an API to their users. Open APIs have many advantages, but they also bring significant business challenges. In this post, I describe key benefits and challenges of open APIs, and why Product Managers should treat an open API as its own product instead of as a feature." Daniel…

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30/06/2014 No Comments

The overhead of the multi-vendor approach

"If the "best of breed" solutions are all very "different" there may be a great deal of training and overhead that may not be there if they are all from a smaller set of vendors with a similar "technology"." Richard Bragg. During a recent LinkedIn Group discussion about the comparisons of Best-of-breed versus single-vendor OSS approaches, Richard Bragg made the insightful comment above. In addition to…

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29/06/2014 2 Comments

Network and system regression testing

"Regression testing means re-testing an application after its code has been modified to verify that it still functions correctly. Regression testing consists of re-running existing test cases and checking that code changes did not break any previously working functions, inadvertently introduce errors or cause earlier fixed issues to reappear. These test cases should be run as often as possible with an automated regression testing tool, so…

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28/06/2014 2 Comments

Play (P4) selects Comverse ONE

Play Poland (P4) Selects Comverse ONE Converged BSS to Power Real-Time Service Capabilities, New LTE Functionalities. Comverse announced that Play (P4), Poland’s fastest growing mobile communication service provider, has selected the Comverse ONE Converged Billing & Active Customer Management solution to support expansion of services and functionalities for its advanced 4G/LTE network serving a rapidly growing subscriber base. Upgrading to the new Comverse ONE product line…

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28/06/2014 No Comments

Reconciling automations

"We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There is a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them." Orson Welles. One of the holy grails of OSS - automation - has many forms. Whether it is in flow-through provisioning, self-healing networks, advanced event filtering, etc. They are…

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27/06/2014 No Comments

The brain scans of high IQ people

"What would we expect to find if we exam­ined the brain scans of peo­ple with high ver­sus aver­age IQ scores? We might pic­ture the active brain of an Ein­stein as a hotbed of smol­der­ing col­ors ”but we’d be wrong. Neu­rol­o­gist Richard Restak sum­ma­rized a UCLA study that com­pared indi­vid­u­als with high IQs to those with aver­age IQs. Restak wrote, The researchers started off with the seem­ingly…

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26/06/2014 No Comments

Vodafone Germany selects Redknee

Redknee Supports Virtualization Strategy for Vodafone Germany. Redknee Solutions Inc. is enabling Tier 1 network operators to implement their virtualization strategies. Redknee offers an end-to-end cloud-based solution with a business model that gives service providers flexibility to differentiate and grow their business, while minimizing the investment risk and optimizing total cost of ownership (TCO). Redknee’s agile approach to virtualization enables the smooth migration of legacy services…

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26/06/2014 No Comments