"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 »“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 »"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 »"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 »"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 »"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 »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 »"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 »"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 »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 »"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 »"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 »“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 »"The race is on for the carriage standard for the IoT’s (Internet of Things). WiFi, 3G, LTE, Weightless are all candidates. Then there’s the short range stuff like Bluetooth LE, NFC, the list goes on. Interesting to see some of the alternates emerging to WiFi. A company Nuel in the UK have just released an ‘industrial’ carriage network solution that operates over any licensed or unlicensed…
Read More »"A strategic inflection point is a time in the life of business when its fundamentals are about to change. That change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights. But it may just as likely signal the beginning of the end." Andrew S. Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive. Let me start today by asking you this question - How is it that the search engine giants…
Read More »POST Telecom Signs Three-Year Application Management Agreement with Amdocs Amdocs announced the signing of a three-year application management deal with POST Telecom, the largest service provider in Luxembourg, formerly known as P&T LUXGSM. Under the agreement, Amdocs will provide application management services to support, operate and enhance the Amdocs charging, billing and customer management solutions deployed as part of POST Telecom's business support systems (BSS) modernization…
Read More »Sprint Selects BroadSoft to Deliver Next-Generation IMS and Voice Over LTE Services. BroadSoft today announced that Sprint has selected BroadSoft's BroadWorks® platform to enhance VoIP services made available by Sprint to both its consumer and business customers. BroadWorks, which is IR.92 and IR.94 compliant, is architected to easily integrate with 2G, 3G, and 4G IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS)-based networks. BroadWorks' Service Centralization and Continuity application server…
Read More »"Identifying which data is best used 'fresh' and which is best 'frozen' and retained for post analysis is a technique operators need to master. Effective exploitation of fresh and frozen data opens up opportunities for innovation and differentiation. Personalized experiences based on each individual customer's own interests, behaviour, geography and unique circumstances should drive loyalty." Peter Briscoe. What Peter Briscoe describes above is analogous to streaming…
Read More »Leading European Operator Chooses CSG Interconnect for Integrated Partner Management CSG Systems International announced that one of the largest European telecom operators has chosen CSG Interconnect to manage its current TV broadcasting and video-on-demand partner ecosystem. CSG Interconnect offers robust multiparty settlement capabilities that provide operators the foundation to build and nurture relationships with all types of third-party service and content partners. Increased investments in state-of-the-art…
Read More »"You need to understand what you are buying, and why, how it will affect your business, and what the potential risks are. That detailed understanding may be beyond the scope of a procurement department." Owen Williams. It is standard practice for an OSS to have in-built resiliency, meaning that if there is a failure in one device or even one whole site then there are failover…
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