"I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do---the actual act of writing---turns out…
Read More »"I'm high maintenance, but I'm worth it." Lara Logan. Funny. Does this ring true for OSS too? :D Network and equipment maintenance causes quite a few dilemmas for OSS products and their operators too. Here are a few tips to consider: Performing maintenance or network topology change often causes an alarm storm for the operators to deal with. Having the ability to mark devices with a…
Read More »"A double-byte character set (DBCS) is a character encoding in which either all characters (including control characters) are encoded in two bytes, or merely every graphic character not representable by an accompanying single-byte character set (SBCS) is encoded in two bytes... A DBCS supports national languages that contain a large number of unique characters or symbols (the maximum number of characters that can be represented with…
Read More »"Multi-tenancy is an architecture in which a single instance of a software application serves multiple customers. Each customer is called a tenant. Tenants may be given the ability to customize some parts of the application, such as color of the user interface ( UI) or business rules, but they cannot customize the application's code." WhatIs.com. Multi-tenancy is becoming an increasingly important concept for OSS in the…
Read More »"I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy." Paul Muldoon. Single Sign-On (SSO) is a means of simplifying user access to a suite of different applications, such as the suite of tools that usually comprise a CSP's OSS. It allows the user to authenticate once and credentials are propagated through other systems after the initial log-in. The interesting part of SSO is how it supports…
Read More »Vivacom Selects NetCracker’s Real-time Transaction Platform to Monetize Quad-Play Services. NetCracker Technology announced that Vivacom, Bulgaria’s leading quad-play service provider, has agreed to upgrade to its real-time, converged BSS platform , including a five-year extension and professional services agreement. As a result of this upgrade, Vivacom will enable real-time transaction capabilities for its mobile, fixed-line, broadband and pay-TV services, all from a single platform.
Read More »"Uncontrolled access to data, with no audit trail of activity and no oversight would be going too far. This applies to both commercial and government use of data about people." John Poindexter. Audit trails are a way of tracing back through the logs of historical activities undertaken through your OSS tools. The easy approach for vendors to provide this functionality is to provide logs on the…
Read More »"It's not what you pay a man, but what he costs you that counts." Will Rogers. Similarly, it's not what you pay for an OSS but what it costs that counts. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is a useful model when evaluating OSS projects because it considers the direct and indirect costs (CAPEX and OPEX) relating to an investment in your OSS. To some extent, direct…
Read More »NetworkMining announces the latest version of its network assurance application. NetworkMining, an independent supplier of IP & optical network mediation software, announced the latest version of its network assurance application. This application introduced two new features: shared risk groups (“SRG”) and support of multi-NMS operations. NetworkMining’s network assurance software is based on its network mediation software that federates network resource data from multiple master data sources…
Read More »"Always have a "higher authority" that you have to "check with" before you can make a decision. This ensures both that you will have more time to think about the deal, and that you will be able to put more pressure on the other party without leading to confrontation (as you do not appear to be the one responsible for the pressure)." Summarist. Looking back on…
Read More »"You have to motivate yourself with challenges. That's how you know you're still alive." Jerry Seinfeld. One of my early OSS projects started off like a rocket. It was a big win, enough to send the OSS vendor to an IPO (Initial Public Offering) that was very successful initially. It was also big enough to earn the sales person a multi-million dollar bonus. Unfortunately we on…
Read More »Normally I provide an update per deal, but on 30 April Amdocs signed four so I'm bundling here. Every OSS deal is hard-won, so four on one day is a significant achievement! 1. Taiwan’s FET Selects Amdocs for Charging and Billing Modernization Project to Provide Enhanced LTE Experience. Amdocs announced that FET (FarEasTone Telecommunications), a leading provider of mobile, fixed-line and broadband Internet services in Taiwan,…
Read More »"Being selective — doing less — is the path of the productive. Focus on the important few and ignore the rest." Tim Ferriss. When speaking with a great friend of mine today, Eddie, I came to the startling realisation that in nearly 700 blog posts, I have forgotten to speak about a major misgiving that many people have when setting expectations for their OSS. Many of…
Read More »"It's not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are." Roy Disney. In this earlier post about decision engineering, I spoke of "closing the loop" to help operators to make better decisions using their OSS / DSS (Decision Support System) tools. Today, I thought I'd use a diagram to better show what I had in mind. The following helps to describe this diagram: Action…
Read More »"Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be." John Wooden. An attribute of many games is the ability to fail, get back up and try again in a slightly different way. If you fail again, you keep getting back up and trying again in slightly different ways, getting better at the game each time. If you're an operator, does your OSS allow you to…
Read More »Shaw Communications Selects NetCracker to Drive Business Agility and Speed to Market. NetCracker Technology announced that Shaw Communications Inc. is deploying the Order Entry, Order Management, Product/Sales Catalogue and Service Library from the NetCracker 9 Product Suite. These new products will assist Shaw in better serving its customer base by cutting operational costs, improving speed-to-market for new services, and accelerating its order-to-cash cycle. Shaw Communications Inc.…
Read More »"The Sabre (Semi-Automatic Business Research Environment) central reservation system, which was originally a part of American Airlines, pioneered online transactions. For the first time, computers were connected together through a network that allowed people around the world to enter data, process requests for information and conduct business. This system revolutionized the entire travel industry and formed the beginnings of the comprehensive and established system used today…
Read More »ThingWorx Powers Largest Japan Mobile Service Provider NTT DOCOMO M2M Cloud Solution "ThingWorx, a leading Internet of Things (IoT) platform provider, announced NTT DOCOMO, Japan’s largest mobile service provider, has partnered with ThingWorx and Nippon Systemware Co., Ltd (NSW) for its new M2M cloud solutions powered by the ThingWorx platform. Serving more than 63 million customers, NTT DOCOMO operates a high-quality nationwide 3G network and one…
Read More »“When anyone asks me how I can best describe my experience of nearly forty years at sea, I merely say, uneventful. Of course there have been winter gales, and storms and fog and the like, but in all my experience, I have never been in any accident of any sort worth speaking about…I never saw a wreck and never been wrecked, nor have I been in…
Read More »"Always speak politely to an enraged dragon." Steven Brust. Regular readers will have noticed my penchant for referring to the Pareto Principle (aka the 80/20 rule). I'm a big believer in focusing on streamlining the high-use or highly important items of OSS implementations. OSS are simply too big and too complex to get bogged down in the minutiae. But for those with a slant for the…
Read More »AT&T creates $500M joint venture for a Netflix-style TV service AT&T, America’s second largest broadband provider and wireless company, is getting into the streaming business with a $500 million joint venture created to acquire, invest in and launch a Netflix-style video streaming service. As the television distribution model that’s been in place for decades collapses online, this deal marks the first time a big U.S. ISP…
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