"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 »“You can’t plan a script. The beauty of improvisation is you are experiencing it in the moment. If you try to plan what the next line is supposed to be, you’re just going to be disappointed when the other people on stage with you don’t do or say what you want them to do and you’ll stand there frozen…Be in this moment." Dick Costolo, CEO of…
Read More »“First thing I want to ask you about: Tell me about your results. I never get hard work confused with success. So I’d walk you through the successes, and what did you do right. I’d also ask you to tell me about your failures. And that’s something people make a tremendous mistake on. First, all of us have had mistakes and failures. And it’s surprising how…
Read More »“Any business arrangement that is not profitable to the other person will in the end prove unprofitable for you. The bargain that yields mutual satisfaction is the only one that is apt to be repeated.” B.C.Forbes There are only a relatively small number of customers in OSS as it stands today, although it is increasing these tool-sets push deeper into enterprise accounts and the Telco world…
Read More »"I'd like to think I'm a great teacher." Gordon Ramsay. I'm not a fan of reality TV, but a friend recently pointed out that there was a common theme in Gordon Ramsay's kitchen makeovers. He always seems to reduce the menu from 30-ish dishes to the 10-ish that can be done well and become the signature dishes for the restaurant. The analogy with OSS is that…
Read More »“People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.” Dale Carnegie. Do you have fun wrestling with OctopOSS projects? At a recent OSS networking event a number of us discussed why we were all Passionate About OSS when the consensus was that they are challenging to the point of being infuriating. But each of these colleagues are esteemed OSS experts who love telling…
Read More »"A state arises, as I conceive, out of the needs of mankind; no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants." Plato. Great salespeople have the ability to convert a customer's wants into genuine needs. When evaluating new OSS products for a CSP, great OSS consultants are able to make connections that the CSP didn't even realise existed, thus taking the customer from a…
Read More »"Although the industry does not yet fully appreciate the challenges and costs of operating in a multi-cloud environment, minimizing integration and operating costs will be a critical success factor. The emergence of an industry standard reference architecture to simplify multi-cloud service management is a priority for the TM Forum and we congratulate Microsoft for their initiative in producing this paper as a strong contribution to meeting…
Read More »"By the time the phone rings, there's already trouble. When that manager is called or this department is reached, it's because someone is disappointed, angry or stuck. Illness, broken promises or a real urgency have led to this new conversation even taking place." Seth Godin. Being the OSS guru that you are, have you spent a day manning the phones taking calls from customers? Not much…
Read More »"Seriously, we are in the midst of the convergence of voice and data and that is challenging the infrastructure of the telephone companies. There are huge commercial interests in the basic technology, but even more so in content delivery and control of content." Steve Crocker. It is a commonly held belief that telecommunications technologies and IT technologies are converging. It would be true to say that.…
Read More »"Each generation goes further than the generation preceding it because it stands on the shoulders of that generation. You will have opportunities beyond anything we've ever known." Ronald Reagan. At any point in time, there will always be a next generation OSS. There will always be new vendors, new products, new services being released by the associated network product vendors (NPVs), so the OSS is always…
Read More »"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 Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) are challenging for their OSS teams on a number of different levels - across technology and personnel. Maintaining business as usual means that all applications are invariably maintained, at first. But the merged entity will…
Read More »"Our vision of what's important is exactly the same today, bringing together the best systems and the best software to empower people with rich information solutions." Bill Gates. Integration, or sharing data, between systems is the key to an OSS providing value-added connections. But how do you go about sharing information between applications? There are four main methods of integration between systems, as follows: Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)…
Read More »