Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

How virtualisation has changed the rules for network inventory

Back in the days when I first started working on OSS/BSS projects (the year 2000), I fell in love first with network inventory solutions. I loved being able to pick through all the data coming from various different inventory data sources (mostly element management systems, direct from devices and east-west systems such as service order management and address / number management tools) Those were the days…

12/12/2022 No Comments

The anecdote where OSS, our new website, my new book and the cannabis industry overlaps

I can see it now. This post is going to get quite a bit off-topic before looping back around to there being an OSS moral-of-the-story. Before that, we’ll touch on a few slightly more tangential topics. Strap yourself in. The ride’s going to get a bit bumpy. As you saw in an earlier post, my next book, “Digital Transformation: Simplified” is in the final stages of…

09/12/2022 No Comments

Automation at the 5G Network Edge

Thought I’d share some information about a 5G Edge Automation project I’ve been assisting with in recent months – in collaboration with luminaries such as EnterpriseWeb (project lead), KX, Intel, Keysight, Tech Mahindra, Red Hat and Fortinet. KX has just shared a blog article, which includes the following quote that helps to summarise why I’m really excited to be helping the team (in a small way). With…

07/12/2022 No Comments

Have you figured out what questions to ask your big OSS/BSS data?

TM Forum holds an absolute treasure-trove of information about the OSS industry, contributed by many leading thinkers. With over 2,500 articles, some are widely known / discussed and others are hidden gems, it holds an amazing repository of knowledge about our industry. Today I landed on an article called, “GB979A Big Data Analytics Use Cases.” For someone as fascinated by OSS/BSS data as me, it certainly piqued…

01/12/2022 No Comments

There’s no competition for OSS cookbooks making food out of soccer balls

Seth Godin recently wrote a brilliant article that describes the craziness of seeking a market with no competition. In entirety, his article goes like this: “There’s no competition for cookbooks on making food out of soccer balls and hockey pucks. There’s no competition for software that charges you to find out the temperature on Mars. There’s no competition for a service that counts how many pairs of shoes…

23/11/2022 No Comments

The most addictive drug in OSS

I’ve spent the last 22-ish years working on OSS and even longer on telco projects. Most of that time has involved way more than the typical 40 hour work week (often more than double). But the amazing thing is that it’s (almost) never felt like it. Time has almost always seemed to fly by so quickly when I work on OSS projects. I happily perform many…

11/11/2022 No Comments

How to buy or sell an OSS/BSS (the company, not the product). Conducting Due Diligence

Have you ever wondered about the process of buying or selling an OSS or BSS company? Are you potentially even thinking of buying or selling an OSS/BSS / telco / tech company? It’s not an event that happens very often, but given the amount of fragmentation in the OSS/BSS industry, M&A (Mergers & Acquisitions) happen more often than you may realise. We’ve been increasingly involved in…

10/11/2022 No Comments

My new book is arriving soon!

I've just about finished writing my next book (way later than intended due to large client project load this year). This one includes 50+ techniques to simplify Digital Transformations (mostly through the lens of OSS transformations).I'd love to get your thoughts about the 2-3 things that I absolutely MUST cover in the book! Leave us your thoughts in the comments section below.

04/11/2022 No Comments

The Football Analogy – How a kid with a ball shows telcos what to do next

Back when I was a little kid, not many of my classmates had footballs. The kid with the ball decided what game was played and who could play. They owned the key asset. The right to play. The other kids were drawn to the game because the asset was unique. These days, the balls are ubiquitous. Almost every kid has more than one. Our kids have…

27/10/2022 No Comments

Exciting week for augmented ways of working in telco

Last week was kind of exciting (and a bit manic!). As well as working on a tech due-diligence (DD) and an important client OSS/BSS roadmap, I had the chance to witness some important steps in the progression on telco Augmented Reality (AR) use-cases. On the software side, we already have many exciting use-cases lining up where AR and OSS cross-enrich each other: Field worker assist -…

24/10/2022 No Comments

Drawing parallels between Cloud Native, Cloud Enabled and Data Native, Data Enabled

Just sharing a playful analogy to end the week (and month). Like me, you've probably heard lots of conversations that contrast cloud-enabled applications with cloud-native. We've heard the arguments that an OSS or BSS application might be "on the cloud," but not really the gold-standard "cloud-native." We know there are lots of legacy OSS / BSS applications that are really just the same monolithic applications, perhaps…

30/09/2022 No Comments

Telecom and OSS has a talent and diversity problem. Or does it?

"The telecom industry is hurtling towards a staffing and skills precipice at a frightening pace, and truly embracing diversity and inclusion in recruitment and human resources strategies looks to be the only way to avoid a calamity, a somewhat sombre Keri Gilder [CEO of Colt Technology Services, a UK-based telco] told attendees here [at TM Forum's DTW event] in Copenhagen this week... One of the big problems…

23/09/2022 2 Comments

Upcoming “Inventory of the Future” webinar

Earlier in the year, Omdia commissioned Passionate About OSS to write a report about the future of network inventory. Not just how the tools themselves are changing, but how they might be used, the new ways of working that will be centred around them, how migration strategies are changing and much more. Now in conjunction with Blue Planet, we'll be conducting a webinar where we'll discuss…

05/09/2022 No Comments

When disaster events call for flying COWs

Natural disasters like bushfires, cyclones and floods can have a disastrous impact on the communities effected by them. The double-whammy is that even after the disaster event, entire regions can be crippled for days or weeks afterwards waiting for infrastructure like comms to be repaired. I was recently talking with a colleague, Bob, who helped coordinate the Warrnambool exchange rebuild after a fire back in 2012.…

31/08/2022 No Comments

Are you letting your OSS get too prescriptive?

In the early days of my career, I was the stereotypical Engineer. I'd get into a project, do the best job I possibly could from a technical perspective, and then get out to move onto the next project. Looking back, I unfortunately had blinkers on through those years. I've been lucky to have retained some great friendships from those days, but I also didn't put any…

30/08/2022 No Comments

Passive devices don’t ping…. Or do they?

As we all know, data quality can be a big problem for OSS, at almost every operator around the world. A lot of this problem stems from the fact that most telcos have a lot of passive infrastructure / objects in their networks. Passive devices don't tend to have programmatic interfaces that allows for current status or details to be polled. This makes it easy for…

18/08/2022 No Comments

New OSS Innovation Video Recording

The \#Adtran #FibreBroadband Symposium was held in Melbourne on 3rd August 2022.This video link below shows the presentation we made at the conference: It's designed specifically for network builders, to show the relevance that OSS and BSS have for their worlds. It also shows a very high level view of OSS past, present and future - including four possible future scenarios covering: Private Networks Digital Twins and Sensor…

05/08/2022 No Comments

How AI and blast radii could inspire next-gen OSS designs

Artificial Intelligence is purported to be the panacea for so many high-volume factors within telco. For example, AI is being used for complex pattern recognition using diverse signal streams like churn reduction. AIOps solutions are making great strides to reducing noise within alarm / event lists, filtering and automating, to limit the number of decisions to be made by humans. We're also seeing AIOps equivalent solutions…

04/07/2022 No Comments

Understanding where OSS POCs go wrong

We've regularly discussed how RFPs / PoCs are usually an inefficient way of finding new products or partners for your OSS (see this link). They're often ineffient regardless of whether you're a supplier, buyer or integrator. They tend to be expensive and time-consuming for all involved. The short paper shown below by Peter Willis, the ex-Chief Researcher at BT, provides a really insightful insider's perspective as…

21/06/2022 No Comments

Why KPIs, QoS and QoE aren’t good enough. What else must we do

Earlier this week we talked about the data management challenge being solved, for the most part. However, we still have large gaps in the decision support challenge, mostly because we don't have tools to help us understand the complex "systems / environments" in which decisions need to be made. I thought the graph below might help to further articulate this thought. Source: Rohde and Schwarz Our…

16/06/2022 No Comments

What is the Exciting Next Frontier of OSS Solution Development?

A discussion with an OSS vendor last week reminded me of an article, and a lecture by Mark Zangari that inspired it, which is now nearly 10 years old. It's worth revisiting because the challenges described are still relevant for OSS today, still not adequately resolved. At the time, Mark described for his audience at SFU that the data management problem had largely been solved (which is…

13/06/2022 No Comments

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