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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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17/06/2014 No Comments

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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16/06/2014 No Comments

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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14/06/2014 No Comments

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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13/06/2014 No Comments

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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12/06/2014 No Comments

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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12/06/2014 No Comments

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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12/06/2014 No Comments

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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11/06/2014 No Comments

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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10/06/2014 No Comments

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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10/06/2014 No Comments

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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10/06/2014 No Comments

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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09/06/2014 No Comments

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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06/06/2014 No Comments

How to make your APIs better

"APIs are everywhere today and can be a great building block of modern applications. But all too often APIs are not truly great. Rather than love your API, developers curse it." John Musser in relation to this slide deck. Yesterday's post was about the importance of having an API that's easy to integrate with for the positive word-of-mouth that it delivers (as opposed to the potentially…

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06/06/2014 No Comments

NetCracker transforms Turk Telecom BSS

NetCracker Next-Generation Revenue Management Solution Rapidly Transforms BSS for Turk Telecom. NetCracker Technology announced that Turk Telecom has completed a major BSS transformation in just seven months utilizing NetCracker’s next-generation Revenue Management solution as its strategic platform for service enablement and systems consolidation. Turk Telecom is Turkey’s leading communications provider. This BSS transformation, supporting Turk Telecom’s substantial fixed-line business, has replaced three legacy billing platforms with…

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05/06/2014 No Comments

Comptel integrates with Smallworld

Comptel Integrates GE’s Inventory Software Solutions to Streamline Telecom Service Fulfilment. Comptel Corporation and GE announced that they have joined forces to help communications service providers (CSPs) federate access to the large amount of data split across physical and logical inventory systems. By enabling service orchestration to reach beyond logical inventory, operators can ensure reliable, accurate and efficient service delivery, decrease costs resulting from “truck rolls”…

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05/06/2014 No Comments

Does your API open doors?

"Remember: An API is a journey, not a destination" John Musser in this slide-deck entitled "Ten Reasons Developers Hate Your API". API (Application Programming Interface) are the mechanisms for getting data into and out of your OSS. Since an OSS doesn't do anything useful without data, APIs are effectively the life-blood of an OSS. Yet, APIs seem to almost be an afterthought for some OSS and…

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05/06/2014 No Comments

MTN Selects CSG International

MTN Selects CSG for Comprehensive Managed Services Program. CSG International announced that MTN, one of the largest communication service providers in the world, has selected CSG for a long-term managed services engagement that will enable MTN South Africa to simplify and streamline its operations and focus its resources on core business lines. Under the terms of the multiyear agreement, CSG will provide end-to-end management of the…

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04/06/2014 No Comments

The components of SDN, NFV, MANO & OSS

When you curate a website / blog called PassionateAboutOSS, it's pretty obvious that you would see the world through OSS-tinted glasses. The tech-world at least. And so it has been for me when evaluating new comms network / service concepts like SDN / NFV. It's been a case of, "that all sounds really exciting and great for network engineers, but how will it help the OSS…

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04/06/2014 3 Comments

The marriage analogy

"Don't marry the person you think you can live with; marry only the individual you think you can't live without." James C. Dobson. A reader recently asked a great question about vendor lock-in. OSS tend to be very sticky (ie it's very hard to change suppliers once an OctopOSS's tentacles have spread throughout the CSP's operations) so vendor lock-in is always a risk that terrorises CSPs. OSS relationships…

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03/06/2014 No Comments

Interruption is the enemy of productivity

"Interruption is the enemy of productivity." Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson in Rework. OctopOSS are tightly entangled beasts. There are so many complexities that collaboration with your fellow project members is essential. But too many OSS projects get bogged down due to different forms of communications - meetings, documentation, conferences, chatting with colleagues and so on. As the team from 37signals indicates in the quote…

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02/06/2014 No Comments