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Where to from here for OSS growth?

"Entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States." Ronald Reagan. Speaking with many of the large OSS vendors, it seems that the tier-one Telco and Utility market is still their prime sales and marketing focus, not to mention their product development focus. Interestingly, I wonder whether this is the ideal market to be targeting, for the following…

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22/02/2014 No Comments

HeavyReading on SDN and NFV

"Software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) create new management challenges that can't be addressed with current operations support systems (OSSs). SDN and particularly NFV – which is emerging as the larger, "umbrella" concept – are therefore encouraging new companies, with new network management approaches, to enter the market, while causing established players to reconsider their OSS approaches, systems and entire architectures," According to a…

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21/02/2014 No Comments

OSS Brainpower

"The trouble with the future is that it usually arrives before we're ready for it." Anonymous. It strikes me that there are a lot of network experts in the world but there aren't very many OSS experts, relatively. As such, OSS is a relatively more immature market in terms of the brainpower that has been dedicated to it over the years. Network virtualisation (eg SDN /…

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20/02/2014 No Comments

Comptel and Tech Mahindra Strategic Partnership

Comptel and Tech Mahindra Agreed on Strategic Partnership for Comptel Fulfillment Solutions. Comptel Corporation and Tech Mahindra have agreed on a strategic fulfillment solutions partnership to deliver aligned value propositions for the ongoing OSS/BSS transformation of Communication Service Providers (CSPs). Comptel will benefit through a strengthened partnership a wider sales channel, increased productivity and secured scalability to deliver large and complex OSS/BSS transformation projects. Tech Mahindra…

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20/02/2014 No Comments

Chunghwa signs Ericsson

Chunghwa boosts customer experience with Ericsson real-time charging and policy control Chunghwa Telecom Co. has selected Ericsson as the consulting and systems integrator of an online charging system (OCS) and policy and charging rules function (PCRF). The new BSS (business support systems) environment supported by Ericsson will include a single integrated online charging and policy control solution that serves existing and LTE prepaid and postpaid subscribers.…

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19/02/2014 No Comments

Huawei buys Fastwire

Chinese networking giant Huawei has acquired Australian company Fastwire, in an attempt to accelerate its capabilities in OSS (operational support systems). Huawei has not formally announced the acquisition, but mentioned it at a London briefing by Leroy Blimegger, its global president of assurance and managed services. He was speaking to press and analysts ahead of a formal announcement at next week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.…

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19/02/2014 No Comments

Doing the hard things

"So, what have these uber-successful, self-disciplined people figured out that we haven’t? I’ve worked with these people one-on-one, and I can assure you they don’t enjoy self-discipline any more than the rest of us. It’s not that they find it easier to do things that most people don’t like doing; it’s that they think differently about it. Self-discipline is not about chores, or punishment, or doing things…

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19/02/2014 No Comments

OSS Survey Results

"Therefore, let us not despair, but instead, survey the position, consider carefully the action we must take, and then address ourselves to our common task in a mood of sober resolution and quiet confidence, without haste and without pause." Arthur Henderson. In a recent survey of OSS operators, respondents were asked two simple questions: What does your OSS really need to do? Why is it important?…

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18/02/2014 No Comments

The problems we’ve got left…

"The problems you've got left... are probably the difficult ones. We'd all like to find discount answers to our problems. Organizations, governments and individuals prefer to find the solution that's guaranteed to work, takes little time and even less effort. Of course, the problems that lend themselves to bargain solutions have already been solved. What we're left with are the problems that will take ridiculous amounts…

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17/02/2014 No Comments

Network virtualisation must….

"Network Virtualisation must.... De-couple Reproduce Automate" Matt Berry in a presentation discussing VMware NSX. The link above takes you on a great presentation of network virtualisation in general, but VMware's specific instantiation, NSX. The flexibility of these types of network changes will similarly impact the flexibility that your OSS will need to achieve. Can your OSS handle this already? At 29:50 into the presentation, it describes…

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16/02/2014 No Comments

Ericsson and Ciena sign strategic agreement

Ericsson and Ciena announce strategic global agreement Ericsson and Ciena announce a strategic global agreement to develop joint transport solutions for IP-optical convergence and service provider software-defined networking (SDN). As part of this agreement, Ericsson offers Ciena's Converged Packet Optical portfolio, including the 6500 Packet-Optical Platform and 5400 family. Ericsson will benefit from Ciena's best-in-class optical technology leadership, including its WaveLogic coherent optical processors and global…

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15/02/2014 No Comments

eTOM process updates

"I believe greatness is an evolutionary process that changes and evolves era to era." Michael Jordan. Well, it's been a long time coming, but I've finally updated the OSS process map page to show more detail about eTOM and addendum GB921-E, which refers to customer-centric, end-to-end process flows.

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15/02/2014 No Comments

Single customer view-point

“Thank your customer for complaining and mean it. Most will never bother to complain. They'll just walk away.” Marilyn Suttle. The customer is the single most important component of a CSP and customer support will be the next competitive battleground (if it wasn't already). But are there any B/OSS that give a CSP's call centre operators a singular customer-by-customer view across all aspects of their experience…

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15/02/2014 No Comments

Huawei and NSN OSS agreement

Huawei and Nokia Solutions and Networks Sign Bi-lateral Agreement for Operations Support System Interoperability Initiative Huawei announced the signing of cross-license agreement for an Operations Support System Interoperability Initiative (OSSii) along with Nokia Solutions and Networks (NSN). The OSSii aims to simplify interoperability between OSS systems in a multi-vendor environment. OSSii will provide easy access to interfaces that earlier were subject to restricted use, and will…

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14/02/2014 No Comments

Business metrics

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." Albert Einstein (possibly). The B/OSS suite means a lot of things to a lot of people in a CSP’s organisation. If you are an executive at a CSP or were to put yourself at the terminal of the C-suite for a day, what are the metrics that are going to be…

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14/02/2014 No Comments

Robi Axiata signs Tango Telecom

Tango Telecom awarded major Policy Control expansion deal by Robi Axiata Tango Telecom, announces a major upgrade and expansion win with Robi Axiata Limited to increase capacity and to provide new and innovative Policy Control use cases such as Dynamic Pricing for Data Services to the operator’s rapidly growing subscriber base. The announcement was made during the Enterprise Ireland trade mission to Singapore and Malaysia led…

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13/02/2014 No Comments

96% Transformation

"First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination." Napoleon Hill. Whilst doing some recent research I came across this interesting study by Frost and Sullivan. See slide 5 of this slide-pack. . Without knowing further details about the sample-set used to prepare this percentage, it…

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13/02/2014 No Comments

Tasks and journeys to improve efficiency

"A task model is a description of the activities users perform in order to reach their goals. Task models can represent both real-world and digital activities. They help you understand how your product can fit into the users' lives. User journeys are a method of expressing the ideal route for your product to facilitate these activities." Jesmond Allen and James Chudley in their book, "Smashing UX…

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12/02/2014 No Comments

12 reasons to choose a career in OSS

“The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them." George Bernard Shaw. Here's my list of reasons why to choose a career in OSS: If you have ambitions to reach a senior position in a CSP then OSS/BSS gives that grounding. It touches almost every part…

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11/02/2014 No Comments

Consultancy is a supply – demand equation

"Consultancy is a supply - demand equation. The reason I have so much great advice to give is because I produce so much but nobody ever wants to take it." :D I am an OSS consultant but I have to face facts - the customers will always know their business better than me. The customer knows the current situation, their desired future situation and understands better…

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10/02/2014 No Comments

The easiest incumbent to disrupt

"The easiest software incumbent to disrupt is the one prioritizing the needs of its strategy over the needs of its customer" Aaron Levie. OSS is a risky business because: There are relatively few customers (although this is expanding through deregulation and an increasing pool of enterprise customers) Each of those customers have unique requirements because their networks, processes, services, customers and business models are all different,…

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09/02/2014 No Comments