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The Ebbinghaus forgetting curve

"[Hermann Ebbinghaus's] forgetting curve describes the exponential loss of information that one has learned. The sharpest decline occurs in the first twenty minutes and the decay is significant through the first hour. The curve levels off after about one day." Wikipedia. As discussed in Ted Gannan's recent blog, "Job-related training is an exercise in helping people develop memories in the hope that the things they learn…

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Redknee receives Tier 1 Operator order

Redknee Receives $9 Million Dollar Order from Tier 1 Operator in Asia Pacific. Redknee Solutions Inc. announced that a leading communications service provider (CSP) in Asia Pacific has signed a $9 million dollar agreement with Redknee to increase its software licenses, services and support. The increase is part of the CSP’s strategy to support the growth of its 4G/LTE network. This significant agreement highlights Redknee’s expertise…

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Zain selects Nokia OSS

Nokia helps Zain Kuwait simplify operations through complete OSS transformation. Zain Kuwait is taking a significant step toward the complete transformation of its operations support systems (OSS) to become more customer-centric. To achieve this, the operator has commissioned Nokia to deploy its unique OSS portfolio using its comprehensive services. These will enable the operator to simplify network operations by having a total network view with centralized…

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Telekom Malaysia selects Accenture

Accenture Helps Telekom Malaysia Transform Its Delivery of Data Services to Enterprises. Accenture has helped Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM), the nation’s largest integrated communications solutions provider, transform its delivery of data services for enterprises with the implementation of support systems for TM’s Internet Protocol Virtual Private Network (IPVPN) capabilities. Leveraging Accenture’s systems integration capabilities, both TM’s business support systems – such as customer relationship management, billing,…

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Product and Service Lifecycle Management

"Life is full of surprises and serendipity. Being open to unexpected turns in the road is an important part of success. If you try to plan every step, you may miss those wonderful twists and turns." Condoleeza Rice. Product and Service Lifecycle Management (PSLM) can be a key differentiator* for competing CSPs. In turn, the effective management of PSLM can be a key differentiator for OSS…

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Yay! 100+ countries

Yay! I just did a check on my analytics page and noticed that people from more than 100 countries have now visited PassionateAboutOSS.com. Thanks one and all!

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Cisco to acquire Tail-f

Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Tail-f — Acquisition Advances Cisco’s Cloud Virtualization Portfolio with Industry-Leading Network Service Orchestration Technology. Cisco announced its intent to acquire privately held Tail-f Systems, a leader in multi-vendor network service orchestration solutions for traditional and virtualized networks. Tail-f’s products help service providers and enterprise IT organizations easily and cost-effectively implement applications, network services and solutions across networking devices. Headquartered in Stockholm,…

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Workflow engines

"While humans are not good at processing systems models, we are much better at analysing and designing them. This leads to a natural human-computer partnership." Mark Zangari. In yesterday's blog we discussed a lecture by Mark Zangari about Decision Support Systems (DSS). Mark's quote above is a really interesting one in the context of CSP process design. Humans are indeed quite proficient at designing workflows and…

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Decision Support System (DSS) efficiencies

"Unlike data, there is little mainstream computerised support for modelling and analysing systems." Mark Zangari in his lecture to San Francisco Uni. As Mark Zangari points out, there are many different tools for assisting our brains to process data (who could've missed all the hype about Big Data tools for example or Business Intelligence or Data Mining, etc), but there aren't so many decision support tools…

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Wireless – video combo

"...if you are a mobile network operator today, shouldn't you focus your energy on what is the largest and fastest growing service on your network, which happens to not be profitable? 85% of the video traffic is OTT and you get little revenue from that. You are struggling to deliver an acceptable video quality for a service that is growing and uses already the majority of…

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The crossword analogy

"The nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is, you know there is a solution." Stephen Sondheim. I won't for one moment try to convince you that there is a single right answer to your OSS puzzle like there is for crosswords as Stephen Sondheim suggests. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are many ways to skin an OctopOSS. However, the OSS / crOSSword…

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Context sensitive help (CSH)

"We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves." Galileo Galilei. When you're a network operator who is following a workflow to do a particular task, it's quite likely that you'll use one or more tools in a suite that includes OSS, BSS, NMS, EMS and more. Of the workflows / tasks that you do, many will be done on a…

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Sri Lanka Telecom upgrades to NetCracker

Sri Lanka Telecom Upgrades to NetCracker’s Digital Business Platform. NetCracker Technology announced that Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT) has chosen to upgrade its existing NetCracker billing and mediation environment to NetCracker’s next-generation billing, rating and active mediation solutions. Sri Lanka Telecom is Sri Lanka’s national ICT solutions provider and leading broadband and backbone infrastructure service provider. SLT delivers quad-play services to consumers; 4G LTE; FTTx; Wi-Fi hotspots;…

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Sprint chooses ItsOn

Sprint to Use ItsOn Smart Services Platform. ItsOn Inc. announced that Sprint will use the ItsOn Smart Services Platform to enhance Sprint’s mobile network capabilities and enable new types of mobile services. The multi-year agreement provides Sprint with the ability to design and implement granular service policy control for various data, text and voice services using ItsOn’s SaaS cloud solution. Sprint will be integrating the ItsOn…

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Dashboard control

"I can see paradise by the dashboard light." Meatloaf. Whether it is dashboards, views or reports, there are two main styles: Canned - ie presentations of data that have been pre-configured by you or your application administrators Ad-hoc - ie presentations of data that you build on an as-needed basis And in the case of reports, there are also Scheduled reports, which are set up to…

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Management link cutover

"I've always believed there are moments in our lives which can be defined as a transition between the before and after, between the cause and the effect." Benjamin X. Wretlind. Many of you will be familiar with the after-hours or overnight cutovers where you make changes to your organisation's infrastructure (eg applications, servers, networks, etc) while everyone else is blissfully unaware, curled up sleeping in bed.…

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Telefónica Selects Amdocs in Chile and Peru

Telefónica Selects Amdocs Products and Services for Quad-Play Transformation in Chile and Peru. Amdocs announced that Telefónica, one of the world's leading service providers with more than 313 million customers across Latin America and Europe, has selected Amdocs for transformation projects in Chile and Peru. By modernizing and standardizing Telefónica's business support systems (BSS) on Amdocs software, Telefónica subscribers in these countries will be able to…

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Zain Kuwait Selects IBM

Zain Kuwait Selects IBM Social Software to Enhance Customer Digital Experience. IBM announced that Zain, the pioneer of mobile telecommunications in Kuwait, has chosen IBM’s social software to deliver deeper, more personalized experiences for its 2.5 million customers in the country. The IBM solution brings together Zain’s digital, mobile and social platforms to offer customers a single, compelling point of engagement. Founded in 1983 as Kuwait’s…

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Are you asking the right questions?

"Big data is currently at the peak of the hype curve, and while service providers can collect more data than ever from many different sources they don't always know what to do with it. Valuable insights are often missed simply because they aren't asking the right questions of the right data to generate useful intelligence." Patrick Tan on TelecomAsia. Big data is often used for identifying…

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Sweating the OSS vendor

"No matter how good you are at planning, the pressure never goes away. So I don't fight it. I feed off it. I turn pressure into motivation to do my best." Benjamin Carson. Over the years, I've seen many a customer put pressure on the vendor (ie sweat the vendor) to do tasks that aren't necessarily contracted, with the customer using the catch-all claim of "the…

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Huawei separates OSS from Managed Services

Huawei Launches OSS Solution independently from Managed Services. Huawei announced that its Operations Support System (OSS) solution is commercially available to all service providers. As the OSS was previously only available as part of Huawei’s Managed Services, the extended availability of the solution further strengthens Huawei’s service portfolio and the company’s position as a global operations transformation partner. Since 2005, Huawei has aggressively expanded its services…

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