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Virtualisation meets Big Data

"When a match has equal partners then I fear not." Aeschylus. The major OSS of the nineties and noughties can be categorised as centralised, structured (ie built on relational databases and modelling connection-oriented services) and not-quite-realtime. I envisage the next generation will be distributed, unstructured (ie virtualised and with rapid shifts in data sources) and very real-time. Almost the antithesis of the old. Virtualisation (ie SDN…

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01/12/2013 No Comments

Hoarders

"We are not cisterns made for hoarding, we are channels made for sharing." Billy Graham. Have you ever stopped to wonder why most CSP's OSS are so complex? Put simply, they are almost all hoarders. They collect services, device types, management systems, data, interfaces, etc. But how often do they ever discard one? Even when their house is full of stuff, they just build a shed…

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30/11/2013 No Comments

Different strokes

"It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences." Audre Lorde. An OSS touches so many parts of a CSP's business that it seems completely obvious (to me at least) that an implementation team needs to blend vastly different skills, personalities, traits, cultures and ambitions into a common set of objectives. But there are times when…

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29/11/2013 No Comments

Suffering

"Suffering is the pathway to awareness." Zen. Why is it that almost every OSS project involves pain, suffering and long hours? The OctopOSS certainly finds a way of whacking you in a different way each time. But each one leads you down the pathway of increased awareness - making you more aware of the potential pitfalls next time around and hence, more valuable. Not too long…

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28/11/2013 No Comments

OSS acquisitions

"Much of what is called investment is actually nothing more than mergers and acquisitions, and of course mergers and acquisitions are generally accompanied by downsizing." Susan George. In recent times, OSS has come under increased attention from the incumbent equipment manufacturers for a variety of reasons, not least being their shifting focus towards services rather than products and virtualisation making networks more software definable. Following this trend,…

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27/11/2013 No Comments

Why is virtualisation a game changer?

"Those parts of the system that you can hit with a hammer are called hardware; those program instructions that you can only curse at are called software." Anonymous. Virtualisation of the network (read SDN, NFV, etc) is a game changer for OSS. To follow the anonymous quote above, most current OSS are great at managing anything that can be hit with a hammer. Let's take inventory…

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26/11/2013 No Comments

Slice and dice

"Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement." Peter Drucker. Permissions are an important part of an OSS, particularly in a carrier with many different operational groups. They are the mechanism that only allows a user to access the parts of the OSS, or its data sets, that are necessary for their particular role. From analysing many different products over the years, it…

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25/11/2013 No Comments

AsiaInfo signs Telenor BSS Transformation

AsiaInfo bags Telenor BSS Transformation Project AsiaInfo-Linkage, Inc., Asia’s leading supplier of BSS systems, today announced that it had secured its first major business support system (BSS) contract with a top tier European operator group. The contract is with Telenor ASA (Telenor Group), which has operations in seven European countries. The win represents AsiaInfo’s first project with a top-tier European operator group after the company formally…

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25/11/2013 No Comments

What can Zara teach your B/OSS?

"Inditex (the owner of the Zara fashion brand) has weathered the global economic downturn better than rivals like H&M as its “fast fashion” model has allowed it to be more responsive to changing consumer demand, while its focus on the latest trends has made it less vulnerable to the rise of discounters like Primark." Thomson Reuter. Zara's fast fashion business model has been a huge success…

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25/11/2013 No Comments

Your depreciating OSS

"Technology is like fish. The longer it stays on the shelf, the less desirable it becomes." Andrew Heller. Almost every element of your OSS depreciates - your hardware (of course), your software, effort, customisations, etc. The only element of your OSS that potentially doesn't depreciate is your data. As data ages, its relevance diminishes so it could be seen to be depreciating. The same is especially true…

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24/11/2013 No Comments

The B/OSS banking ecosystem

"One can envisage that future banks will run themselves general ledgers, treasury systems, product catalogues - other IT systems will be outsourced to specialized digital services providers. Most of interactions with customers, including CRM, electronic payments, sales channel support, and client reporting will form a part of external digital environment: Banks will deliver their products to reselling and cooperating organizations with white labels." Janusz Filipiak on the…

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23/11/2013 No Comments

Solomon Telekom signs a BSS contract with Inomial

Solomon Telekom has something to Smile about Inomial has signed a major deal with Solomon Islands incumbent Solomon Telekom to provide its billing system for mobile, fixed and Internet services. It's one of a number of recent deals Inomial has done in the South Pacific this year. Solomon Telekom selected Inomial’s Smile revenue management solution to replace their legacy billing system that was over 15 years…

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22/11/2013 No Comments

The OSS world moves Eastwards

"The centre of gravity of the world economy is the geographic hotspot of income generation based on the distance weighted gross domestic product of 700 locations (Quah, 2011). In 1980 the hotspot was in the Atlantic Ocean midway between the economic powerhouses of Europe and the United States. However, today the hotspot is over Saudi Arabia and by 2030 the hotspot is forecast to shift to a location…

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22/11/2013 No Comments

Ask forgiveness later

"It is often easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission." Grace Hopper. There are many barriers to delivering an OSS, often built up from the rules of the organisations involved. Sometimes the rules make sense. Other times, rules (and the people responsible for enforcing these rules) just prevent progress. The best implementers I've worked with are great at finding lateral approaches to get…

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21/11/2013 No Comments

Logic vs Action

"Logic will not change an emotion, but action will." Zig Ziglar. So many OSS projects get bogged down in logic, discussions, technical pontification, etc. But in my experience, a month of discourse can be replaced by a week of doing, especially when the customer is using COTS (ie commercially available off the shelf solutions). Or in the case of one project that I worked on, 18+…

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20/11/2013 No Comments

Telefonica chooses Comarch

Telefónica appoints Comarch a partner in its multi-country OSS transformation Comarch has been selected by Telefónica for a position of the European OSS Fulfilment and Planning systems vendor. Comarch will deliver Next Generation OSS licenses as well as comprehensive transformation services, and long-term support for Telefónica in the network planning and optimization domains. Having a strong reference earned from an implementation for Telefónica Deutschland, Comarch has…

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19/11/2013 No Comments

Four steps to serendipity

"Lucky people meet their perfect partners, achieve their lifelong ambitions, find fulfilling careers, and live happy and meaningful lives. Their success is not due to them working especially hard, being amazingly talented or exceptionally intelligent. Instead, they simply appear to have an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time and enjoy more than their fair share of lucky breaks." Richard Wiseman,…

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19/11/2013 No Comments

If people like you

"If people like you they’ll listen to you, but if they trust you they’ll do business with you." Zig Ziglar. As we all know, OSS is a sticky business. Once an OSS vendor gets into an organisation, it's often hard to get them out. I've seen OSS vendors treat their customers more like competitors than partners, engineering their products to be nearly impossible to remove and…

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18/11/2013 No Comments

An unlikely competitive advantage?

"The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery." Mark Van Doren. When your larger competitors are out there spruiking, promoting, marketing and advertising, could teaching be your competitive advantage? I have a firm belief that Cisco's training programs (ie CCNA, etc) are a strategic advantage compared with other networking vendors. Not only do they sell the training / accreditation but they also effectively extend…

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17/11/2013 2 Comments

Self Organising Networks (SON)

"A Self-Organizing Network (SON) is an automation technology designed to make the planning, configuration, management, optimization and healing of mobile radio access networks simpler and faster." Wikipedia. SON has been specified with mobile networks in mind, particularly LTE (Long Term Evolution) but could form a set of objectives for all future communications networks. As stated in a white paper from Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), SON offers…

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16/11/2013 No Comments

Korea Telcom selects Ericsson

KT speeds up mobile content using Ericsson technology KT, South Korea's leading telecoms provider, has entered into an agreement with Ericsson to launch a mobile content acceleration service in its live LTE network. This will be the world's first commercial deployment of its kind, and it builds on technology provided by Ericsson. KT completed a technical feasibility study in January this year after testing and verifying…

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16/11/2013 No Comments