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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

London Live selects Ericsson

London Live selects Ericsson broadcast services for London dedicated TV channel London Live has awarded Ericsson a five-year broadcast services contract for its new London-dedicated TV channel. The Evening Standard, London's most read newspaper, was awarded the 12-year license in February 2013 to broadcast the first London-centric TV channel - and will launch the channel in spring 2014. London Live will be transmitted 24/7 via terrestrial…

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16/11/2013 No Comments

Unlimited OSS mileage

"When you rent a car with unlimited mileage and a full tank of gas, how far are you willing to go? You're only limited by desire and time. The web feels that way to me. You can share as many secrets, ask as many questions, write as many blog posts as you can dream up. You can invest the time and energy to connect with as…

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15/11/2013 No Comments

The Inverted OSS Pyramid

"The concept behind the inverted pyramid format is relatively simple. The writer prioritizes the factual information to be conveyed in the news story by importance. The most essential pieces of information are offered in the first line, which is called the lead... The writer then provides the rest of the information and supporting contextual details in descending order of importance, leaving the least essential material for…

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14/11/2013 No Comments

Shifting from maintenance mode to innovation mode.

"IT as a service is a game changer. Because you now have components of the IT department existing in the cloud, you free your in-house IT staff to shift from a maintenance mode to an innovation mode. As such, your IT department can focus on achieving business goals, creating innovative solutions, and driving sales rather than upgrading individual user's computers and firefighting everyday problems." Daniel Burrus,…

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13/11/2013 No Comments

Do you really need customisation?

"I think doing variations on a classical theme is a dangerous thing to do." Tori Amos. Many organisations select a COTS (Commercial off-the-shelf) OSS tool and immediately start thinking about customisations to make it do exactly what they want. That's one way... but not necessarily the best long-term solution. Customisations are intoxicating for both CSPs and OSS vendors alike because of the feeling that comes from…

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12/11/2013 No Comments

The OSS inertia principle

"Inertia is the resistance of any physical object to any change in its motion (including a change in direction)." Wikipedia. According to classical physics, Force equals Mass x Acceleration (F = ma). In other words, the greater the mass, the more force must be applied to reach a given acceleration (ie to effect a change). Just as this works with physical objects, it also works with…

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11/11/2013 No Comments

NFV – an IT resolution

"So with NFV it was important to avoid building virtual versions of the same thing we already had.. so we needed to get people who weren't threatened by the transformation that NFV demands." Tom Nolle, on TelecomTV. In the interview by TelecomTV, Tom Nolle highlights a number of points that have significant ramifications to the OSS industry, not least the one mentioned above. Others include:  "The…

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10/11/2013 No Comments

Transformational Change

"A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past." Fidel Castro. In yesterday's blog, we discussed the air-traffic controller analogy for incremental change to your OSS via the use of projects. Today we talk of transformational change. Transformation has appeared in the Telco vernacular as a guiding vision of a future business state that is remarkably different from the current state…

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09/11/2013 No Comments

The air-traffic controller analogy

"The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance." Alan Watts. A colleague and friend suggested the following as a topic to write about - "...describing OSS projects would be the constant ongoing change to the business environment supported and technology base enabling that." Frank has a great point. When it comes to operating…

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08/11/2013 No Comments

Crnogorski Telekom signs with Amdocs

Montenegro’s Crnogorski Telekom Selects Amdocs Software and Services for Business Support Systems Consolidation  Amdocs announced that Crnogorski Telekom a.d. has selected Amdocs software and services for a strategic business support systems (BSS) consolidation project across fixed, wireless, Internet and IPTV operations. By replacing multiple third-party systems with Amdocs software, Crnogorski Telekom will be able to gain operational efficiencies with fewer systems to manage and a single…

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07/11/2013 No Comments