Logo_white_on_blue-min

Blogs

Filter by Date Period

Select Date
Filter by Date Range
Filter by Date Range

Filter by Category

Filter by Category

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…

Read More »
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.

Read More »
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…

Read More »
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…

Read More »
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…

Read More »
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…

Read More »
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…

Read More »
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…

Read More »
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…

Read More »
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…

Read More »
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,…

Read More »
09/02/2014 No Comments

Cardinality

"In the context of databases, cardinality refers to the uniqueness of data values contained in a column. High cardinality means that the column contains a large percentage of totally unique values. Low cardinality means that the column contains a lot of “repeats” in its data range." Techopedia. Whilst researching today, I came across a word that I'd never heard before - Cardinality. As indicated above, in…

Read More »
08/02/2014 No Comments

Ca$h is King

"The bull or optimist has no eyes for past or present, but only for the future, where streams of revenue play in his imagination." James Buchan. As the old saying goes, "cash is king." Or in CSP parlance, revenue is king. Does this mean that the CSP's OSS must help generate revenue? Well, it certainly doesn't hurt and in fact this should be the target for…

Read More »
07/02/2014 No Comments

Carlos Slim buys from Opmantek

Small Gold Coast outfit Opmantek beats software giants for major telco deal Gold Coast-based IT company Opmantek Software has landed another seven-figure deal with a major Latin American telco, beating out the world's biggest software giants to secure the business. The contract with a telco in Ecuador will see Opmantek's software used by an estimated 40 per cent of Latin America's population, excluding Brazil - about…

Read More »
06/02/2014 No Comments

IBM looking to sell their SDN

"IBM’s big January sale looks set to continue with the firm’s software-defined networking [SDN] business rumoured to be on the market for some $1 billion." ITProPortal. This is a fascinating story if true. Given that I'm sure that network virtualisation, be it SDN or other, will become widespread in future years, it makes me ponder IBM's strategic thinking. If you consider that IBM has limited presence in…

Read More »
06/02/2014 No Comments

Sequential product releases

"Watch the product life cycle but more important watch the market life cycle." Phillip Kotler. In yesterday's blog "What must I do today?" and an earlier post entitled "The television analogy" I spoke of the parallels between the television and the telecommunications industry. I have a few diagrams / tables to elaborate today. The standard product life-cycle graph is defined to look something like the following:…

Read More »
05/02/2014 No Comments

HTC Selects NetCracker

HTC Selects NetCracker to Enhance Network Operations and Enable Advanced Digital Service Offerings NetCracker Technology announced that HTC selected NetCracker as a key partner to conduct a joint upgrade of NetCracker’s resource inventory solution – part of the NetCracker 9.0 suite of converged OSS/BSS applications. This upgrade has been implemented successfully and will drive efficiencies across a number of critical business processes including service fulfillment, network…

Read More »
04/02/2014 No Comments

I need your help. What must I do today?

"When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die." Eleanor Roosevelt. It's a regular topic of conversation here (and elsewhere too of course), that CSP's revenue streams are under pressure. CSPs have been in the game of selling technology-based services traditionally but just as we've seen in the television industry (please see earlier blog entitled "The television analogy") I believe we're reaching (or have…

Read More »
04/02/2014 No Comments

And now, the architecture

"Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service." Steve Jobs. Last week I played a game of conjecture in Massive Inflection Point, asserting what a next generation OSS should consist of based on a set of game-changing technologies coming through. Today, I'm going one step further with a corresponding high-level architecture for you…

Read More »
03/02/2014 No Comments

Motivation-Big.Data-Gamification

“The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide that you are not going to stay where you are.” J.P. Morgan. At their core, OSS and BSS are primarily about efficiency. They are tools to make the management of the following (and many more) easier and more efficient: Order entry Alarm / event management Service level tracking Network health tracking Field workforce management (truck-rolls) Trend identification…

Read More »
02/02/2014 No Comments