Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

Ericsson acquires MetraTech

Ericsson acquires MetraTech to accelerate cloud and enterprise billing capabilities. Ericsson announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire US-based MetraTech Corp., a provider of metadata-based billing, commerce and settlement solutions uniquely adaptable to multiple business models and industries. The acquisition includes all 140 employees and contractors comprising a team of highly-skilled software experts. It will further build upon Ericsson's expertise in billing and expands…

29/07/2014 No Comments

Virtual workflows

"The best way to systematize your business is to first do each job yourself. Find the best or preferred way to do each task, and create a system for doing it that way that is easy to follow. Repeat this process for every function of your business until every part is systematized.." Michael Gerber. The Telco industry is built around patterns. Even bespoke services tend to…

29/07/2014 No Comments

Automated design

"...with big data techniques we can start to find out where the clusters of [revenue generating businesses] and where the clusters of bad coverage are so you can be far more selective of where you rollout to." Kevin Noonan. In yesterday's blog, we discussed the likelihood of more OSS vendor suites containing large-scale network design automation tools due to the potential for quick payback periods on…

28/07/2014 No Comments

Automated network design

"The smart way to optimise infrastructure is to incorporate optimality into the design." Geoff Prince. In a recent presentation by Mike Quigley, NBN Co's departing CEO, he mentioned that OSS/BSS gave him his biggest nightmares. One of the NBN Co's other significant problems he mentioned was the preparation of designs to service every home in Australia with broadband network services. Given the size of the challenge, NBN…

27/07/2014 No Comments

Multi-Technology Operations Systems Interface (MTOSI)

"Multi-Technology Operations System Interface (MTOSI) is a standard for implementing interfaces between OSSs. Service providers (carriers) use multiple Operational Support Systems (OSS) to manage complex networks. Since the various parts of the network must interact, so must the OSSs. It is standardized by the Telemanagement Forum (TM Forum). The TMF Frameworx provides a set of reference models that aid in analyzing and designing next generation BSS…

26/07/2014 No Comments

Connectionless technology management

"Unlike connection oriented Subnetworks which often constitute the widespread transport layer (DWDM, SONET/SDH) shared by many network applications, connectionless Subnetworks such as Metro Ethernet are likely to be deployed as smaller “islands” dedicated to a single network application (e.g., multiple sites of a corporate customer)." TM Forum's "SD1-44 Connectionless Technology Management." Many OSS tools that have been around for a while were originally conceived around connection-oriented…

25/07/2014 2 Comments

Sprint Selects NetCracker

Sprint Selects NetCracker OSS to Support Rollout of Revolutionary Sprint Spark Network Technology. NetCracker Technology announced that Sprint has agreed to a multi-year agreement that will expand its use of NetCracker’s OSS solutions to support its Sprint Spark™ enhanced LTE rollout. Sprint Spark uses next-gen wireless technology to deliver a whole new level of mobile Internet experience. Sprint is among the largest telecommunications providers in the…

24/07/2014 No Comments

The first law of holes

"It is a good thing to follow the first law of holes; if you are in one, stop digging." Denis Healey. Unfortunately it's far too easy to find yourself in a hole on an OSS project. I have to admit that I've ended up in a few OSS holes myself. Even sadder, I have to admit that a few project teams I've been involved with have…

24/07/2014 No Comments

Multi-tenancy models

"An empty house is better than a bad tenant." Irish Proverb. As described in an earlier post (High-Rise OSS), multi-tenancy is becoming an important feature for OSS applications, particularly in highly virtualised environments. Aside from the shared infrastructure itself, there are two* key components of multi-tenancy models for OSS implementers to consider. Applications - Naturally, the OSS tool/s must deliver the functionality that allows CSPs to…

23/07/2014 4 Comments

Automile and Telit partner on connected cars

Automile, Telit M2M partner on connected car platform. Automile AB, a Swedish start-up based in Stockholm, has built a telematics platform with the Internet of Things in mind, called Automile PRO, reinventing fleet management for businesses to connect with their car and driving data via a smart cellular based OBD II device, available in 53 countries. Automile has partnered with Telit Wireless Solutions to use Telit…

22/07/2014 No Comments

OSS – the stuff of nightmares?

"For the CEO of a Telco the development of major OSS/BSS capability can be the stuff of nightmares. It was these large IT systems that I most feared would be the bottleneck in rolling out services on the NBN." Mike Quigley , in a presentation to TelSoc. Mike was the founding CEO of NBN Co, Australia's National Broadband Network, a start-up responsible for implementing the largest…

22/07/2014 No Comments

“Mastering your OSS” – book signing

Thanks to Evan Linwood for providing a write-up about "Mastering your OSS" on his blog over at ArenaCore.com. He's also included a photo of the first signing of my book.

21/07/2014 No Comments

Google to release SDN management model

"The industry talks a lot about the network data plane and the network control plane, but it tends to hand wave over the management plane in SDN. The management plane is extremely important, however, because it defines how services and applications are orchestrated. In order to run a large infrastructure, you need abstraction. In order to implement abstraction, you need models. Those models don't exist in…

21/07/2014 2 Comments

No one is an OSS expert

"Everyone's an OSS expert, but no one is an OSS expert" Ryan Jeffery. There are so many slivers of OSS. They are broad categories such as processes, infrastructure, databases, network engineering, programming, interfaces, sales, operations, strategy, communications, change management, marketing, services, leadership, field-workforce, products, design, etc, etc. The number of possible categories is huge. But then each category can be broken down into slivers of expertise…

20/07/2014 No Comments

Root-cause isolation and learning

"When you have a serious problem, it's important to explore all of the things that could cause it, before you start to think about a solution. That way you can solve the problem completely, first time round, rather than just addressing part of it and having the problem run on and on. Cause and Effect Analysis gives you a useful way of doing this." Mind Tools.…

19/07/2014 No Comments

Understanding how a lion hunts

"If you want to understand how a lion hunts don’t go to the zoo. Go to the jungle." Sadly, I'm not sure who the true source of this quote is. It's attributed to various people in the advertising game. Irrespective of who said it first, in my mind this quote is such a powerful analogy for OSS product development. For an OSS developer, the only way…

18/07/2014 No Comments

The 70/20/10 Innovation Model

"Spend 70 percent of your time on the core business, 20 percent on related projects, and 10 percent on unrelated new businesses." Attributed to Eric Schmidt here on CNN.com. Yesterday we spoke of the 70/20/10 Learning Model. Today we apply the same ratio, but this time it relates the the principle used by Eric Schmidt at Google to allocate effort (as described in the quote above).…

17/07/2014 No Comments

Comarch enters Brazilian Telecoms

Comarch expands Latin American presence, enters Brazilian telecom market. Comarch, a provider of complete IT solutions for telecoms, announced that its BSS solutions have been chosen by a U.S.-based communications provider for the launch of services in Brazil. The launch, which builds upon Comarch’s already established presence in Latin America, will offer Brazilian telecoms and consumers cost-efficient services via VoIP technologies. Fueling the Brazilian service will…

16/07/2014 No Comments

The 70/20/10 Learning Model

"Michael Lombardo and Robert Eichinger published the data from one study in their 1996 book ‘Career Architect Development Planner’ which revealed that lessons learned by successful and effective managers are roughly 70% from tough jobs, 20% from people (mostly the boss) and 10% from courses and reading." 70-20-10 Forum. Does that match up with your own experiences? Have you learnt 70% of what you know (in…

16/07/2014 10 Comments

Is loss aversion alive in OSS?

"Turns out that most of us don’t like losing. In fact, it’s what the academics call loss aversion. We feel the pain of loss more acutely than we feel the pleasure of gain. In other words, we may like to win, but we hate to lose." Carl Richards here on NYTimes. If you've ever worked at a large Telco, you'll have noticed their ability to accumulate…

15/07/2014 No Comments

Sell to – Sell through

"One of my partners reminds us that, to be a success, a company must not only sell successfully to its immediate customers (“sell-to”), but also enable the customer to sell successfully to his/her end customers (“sell-through”), not just once, but repeatedly. Too often we (as venture investors) see businesses that have revenue traction selling to immediate customers. But, that success proves illusory when the end-customer does…

14/07/2014 No Comments

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