Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

Vivacom Selects NetCracker

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.

08/05/2014 No Comments

Audit trails

"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…

08/05/2014 1 Comment

Total Cost of OSS Ownership

"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…

07/05/2014 No Comments

NetworkMining announces product release

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…

06/05/2014 No Comments

Higher power negotiations

"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…

06/05/2014 No Comments

Pushing OSS up-hill

"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…

05/05/2014 No Comments

Amdocs signs four new deals

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,…

04/05/2014 No Comments

What an OSS shouldn’t do

"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…

03/05/2014 No Comments

Closing the loop to make better decisions

"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…

02/05/2014 No Comments

Learning to fail

"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…

01/05/2014 No Comments

Shaw Communications Selects NetCracker

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.…

30/04/2014 No Comments

The Sabre Analogy

"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…

30/04/2014 2 Comments

ThingWorx and DOCOMO form M2M cloud

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…

29/04/2014 No Comments

OSS risk approaches

“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…

28/04/2014 No Comments

Slaying performance dragons

"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…

27/04/2014 No Comments

AT&T creates $500M TV service

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…

26/04/2014 No Comments

NewWave extends with NetCracker

NewWave Communications Agrees to Long-Term Extension for Converged BSS with NetCracker. NetCracker Technology announced today that NewWave Communications has agreed to a long-term extension for its converged BSS and customer self-service solutions. NewWave Communications provides cable TV, broadband and voice services to consumers and businesses in the Southern and Midwestern United States. This five-year agreement renews NewWave and NetCracker’s ongoing partnership for advanced, converged revenue management…

25/04/2014 No Comments

Wresting control during a merger

"A merger is hard to pull off under any circumstances. It's harder when everybody is against you." Carly Fiorina. As mentioned yesterday, in a merger / acquisition situation where there are two distinct OSS, it's common for the stronger of the organisations in the partnership to dictate the technical direction. It's also for the stronger group to proceed with the systems they're familiar with and perhaps…

25/04/2014 No Comments

Mastering your data

"Every single time you make a merger, somebody is losing his identity. And saying something different is just rubbish." Carlos Ghosn. Today's blog is derived from a wonderful question from a subscriber to the PAOSS blog. She asked: I would be interested to know more about Data integrity/Synchronization approach and challenges, especially when various mergers/acquisitions involved. Due to this reason service provider has various Inventory systems and none of…

24/04/2014 No Comments

Champion Broadband re-signs with NetCracker

Champion Broadband Signs Multi-Year Renewal for NetCracker Revenue Management Solution. NetCracker Technology announced that Champion Broadband has agreed to a multi-year renewal for its fully hosted Revenue Management solution. This managed service will continue to support and enable Champion’s end-to-end order-to-cash process for its residential, SMB and B2B service offerings. Founded in 2003, Champion Broadband is a cable TV, Internet and telephony provider serving major urban…

23/04/2014 No Comments

China Unicom deploys speech analytics from Verint

China Unicom deploys Impact 360 Speech Analytics from Verint Systems. Verint(R) Systems Inc. announced that Shanghai Unicom, a subsidiary of China Unicom--a leading telecommunications carrier in China--is gaining continued value, following its implementation of Impact 360(R) Speech Analytics(TM) . The organization uses the software to help uncover underlying customer issues and key drivers of calls into its contact center. Using Verint's speech analytics software--part of the…