"When someone discovered that the coffee bean made a tasty, refreshing drink, it was not necessary to do more than say so. Competition to sell coffee beans meant price wars and mergers and regulation and ethical dilemmas. Now, no-one sells their coffee beans as ‘cheaper’ – it is not ‘sustainable’ to do so. Coffee beans are sold on whether a range of sweet, hot milky drinks…
Read More »"The most corrosive piece of technology that I've ever seen is called television - but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent." Steve Jobs. In the television age, the first half saw the biggest margins going to the technology innovators. The technologies were the drivers and innovators reaped their rewards. TV sets, outside broadcast vans, television stations were expensive, transmission technologies, etc. But as the…
Read More »"Here’s a thought exercise for the audience: Imagine no Internet: no data on phones, no Ethernet or wi-fi connections at home — or anywhere. No email, no Google, no Facebook, no Skype. That’s what we would have if designing the Internet had been left up to phone and cable companies, and not to geeks whose names most people don’t know, and who made something no business…
Read More »"The other part of outsourcing is this: it simply says where the work can be done outside better than it can be done inside, we should do it." Alphonso Jackson. In this last of a nine-part series on non-traditional OSS markets, we touch on the possible business model differences to support and implement OSS. With a CSP, the business is focussed on delivering communication services. As…
Read More »"You must learn to talk clearly. The jargon of scientific terminology which rolls off your tongues is mental garbage." Martin H. Fischer. When implementing an OSS for a CSP, the communications network is the centre of the universe so all assets and their associated attributes and naming conventions revolve around the communications network. However, in a utility network, the communications network is generally just a support…
Read More »"I think I understand something about space. I think the job of a sculptor is spatial as much as it is to do with form." Anish Kapoor. Whilst a utility (eg rail, electricity, water, mining, etc) will have many facets of similarity with CSPs, the one major difference tends to be that it will have far fewer customers/subscribers on its network. This has a number of…
Read More »This page provides links to 10 techniques I've developed for Implementing an OSS
Read More »"The precision of naming takes away from the uniqueness of seeing." Pierre Bonnard. As mentioned in yesterday's blog, the non-CSP market is a fascinating one with regards to naming conventions. For CSPs, I recommend to start with some form of variation on the ITU M.1400 recommendation, as shown on the naming convention tool page. A communication network circuit will generally have an A-end and a B-end…
Read More »"Competitiveness demands flexibility, choice and openness" David Cameron Over the last four days, we've covered a number of aspects of introducing OSS into non-traditional customers. There is one major risk that awaits the vendor that broadens its customer net though. Whilst there are similarities at a node-arc-service model across many industries, there are also industry-specific challenges that await. For example, in the CSP industry, diverse path…
Read More »"And God said, 'Let there be light' and there was light, but the Electricity Board said He would have to wait until Thursday to be connected." Spike Milligan. Over the past few days, we have spoken about the different industries that have been, or could benefit from the introduction of OSS. Utilities companies (electricity, water, rail) tend to have extensive communications networks to manage their core…
Read More »"Enlightenment must come little by little - otherwise it would overwhelm." Idries Shah. It was whilst heading up a communications roll-out at a huge gas processing plant in the middle east that I realised what a massive opportunity existed for OSS vendors outside the traditional CSP market. We designed a converged network that encapsulated traditional technologies such as IP (Internet Protocol data networks), SDH, DWDM, VoIP,…
Read More »“Different roads sometimes lead to the same castle.” George R.R. Martin. In yesterday's blog entry, non-traditional industries were discussed as potential users of OSS technologies. In reality, OSS just model the assets of CSPs as nodes, arcs and services, with all sorts of associated attributes. In a telco network: node = network device (eg router/switch), arc = communications cable, microwave link, and services = network paths or…
Read More »"I always say the next big thing will happen in unexpected places." Anna Sui. I recently ran a survey to find out more about the true OSS market needs. One of the responses caused a light-bulb moment. Despite having worked with customers from alternate industries and having nearly 250 entries in this blog roll, there has been little mention of the growth markets in non-CSP industries.…
Read More »"You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment." Alvin Toffler As an OSS vendor, how many of your customers operate in different sectors and don't compete directly with each other? If the answer is a high percentage then you may wish to consider benchmarking to find out which implementations have…
Read More »"You’ll never have a product or price advantage again. They can be easily duplicated, but a strong customer service culture can’t be copied." Jerry Fritz. "Customer satisfaction is worthless. Customer loyalty is priceless." Jeffrey Gitomer In an earlier post about Net Promoter Score (NPS), it was indicated that Apple had an NPS of +70 whereas telcos often languish in negative NPS scores. Of course there are…
Read More »"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." Charles Darwin What service model will be the most successful offering that OSS vendors can make to their CSPs? On-premise? Cloud-based? OSSaaS (OSS as a Service)? Other? Traditionally, on-premise was the stand-out leader. But there are now situations where alternative models could be the better…
Read More »"There are no exceptions to the rule that everybody likes to be an exception to the rule." Charles Osgood. When it comes to customer experience management at a CSP, Charles Osgood's statement rings true. A friend of mine recently talked about the challenge of solution design where "Everyone is an exception." When it comes to designing OSS systems and processes, too many engineers / analysts treat Osgood's…
Read More »"We're able to do that because we really understand what our brand is from a tribal knowledge standpoint. It has been handed down from generation to generation." Joanne Bischmann There is a tendency for an OSS vendor / integrator to breeze into a customer's site and dictate the way that the OSS project will be run. But this doesn't take into account the importance of the…
Read More »"It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed." Charles Darwin. Collaboration is a big buzz-word in the ICT industry at the moment. This is largely being driven via improvements in unified communication technologies - voice, video and data converged onto an organisation's data network to facilitate an increase in remote real-time collaboration.…
Read More »"In the end it is subscribers who pay the bills. And subscribers, though often sold on the gadgets and networks technologies powering their favourite services, in the end it is the delivery of the service that matters. Whether they stream or download content over one technology or another isn’t important to them, their main concern is having a connection capable of delivering the service wherever and…
Read More »“I think we have a gap that we have to close,” he said in response to a question on the OTT threat. “The internet brands I think will become serious competitors for us as an industry and I think can erode our revenue models more than sometimes we appreciate.” He added that telcos needed to change their business model to be more nimble and provide a different cost…
Read More »