Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

Which approach is better for your OSS? Hedgehog or fox?

Jim Collins' book, "Good to Great," has achieved iconic status in the world of corporate strategy. One of the ideas he shares in this book is The Hedgehog Concept. I'd encourage you to take a look at the link above. It provides excerpts from the book, outlining why the "great" companies in his study acted like hedgehogs, whereas his "comparison" companies (ie the lesser competitors) acted…

06/05/2021 No Comments

012 – Building an OSS/BSS from Scratch for a Mid-Market Telco with Steven White

While it's the tier-1 telco OSS/BSS that get all the attention, it's actually the mid-market that makes up the largest number of OSS/BSS by customer count (in most deregulated telco markets). The mid-market consists of Tier 2/3 telcos and ISPs with subscriber counts measured in the thousands rather than hundreds of thousands or millions. However, the OSS/BSS of this mid-market still has to cover the same…

03/05/2021 No Comments

Where does OSS R&D come from?

A question came in from a reader this morning, "What is the role(inputs) of the service providers in the research (technology modernization) compared to the equipment vendors and standard bodies (3GPP, TMForum, IETF, etc.)? Do operators have any influence in the research and how the coordination happens (except being the members) between the vendors, operators, and standard bodies?" Brilliant question/s! I bet you have some thoughts…

03/05/2021 No Comments

How to Avoid the Pitfalls of OSS Sharecropping

Firstly, what is Digital Sharecropping? Nicholas Carr coined the term Digital Sharecropping all the way back in 2006, citing the phenomenon where, "One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few." In other words, the landholder or platform owner (eg Facebook) is…

21/04/2021 No Comments

You’ve heard of a NOC and a SOC. What about a DOC?

You've no doubt heard about NOC (Network Operations Centres) and SOC (Security Operations Centres) [or perhaps alternatively, Service Operations Centres], which are the people / processes / infrastructure / tools that allow a network operator to manage the network health and security posture of their networks. The NOC and SOC are vitally important to keeping a modern network running. Unfortunately though, we're missing a DOC, and…

21/04/2021 2 Comments

What is the best OSS?

We're often asked, "what's the best OSS / BSS?" One of the biggest challenges for OSS buyers is the huge amount of choice available. There are well over 500 listings in our Blue Book OSS / BSS Vendor Directory, so buyers are spoilt for choice. The problem is there is usually too much choice, with many competing products across any given functional sub-category. This can easily…

20/04/2021 No Comments

011 – Developing a Market for your OSS/BSS with Steve Hateley

There are just so many vendors in the OSS/BSS market (our vendor directory has over 400 listings - https://passionateaboutoss.com/directory) that it can be incredibly challenging to differentiate one product or vendor from the next. OSS/BSS customers may only know of a handful of possible solutions, but there are plenty of others out there. Cutting through the product / brand awareness challenge to get the attention of…

19/04/2021 No Comments

There’s an OSS Security Elephant in the Room!

The pandemic has been beneficial for the telco world in one way. For many who weren't already aware, it's now clear how incredibly important telecommunications providers are to our modern way of life. Not just for our ability to communicate with others, but our economy, the services we use, the products we buy and even more fundamentally, our safety. Working in the telco industry, as I'm…

19/04/2021 No Comments

How to make your OSS a Purple Cow

With well over 500 product suppliers in the OSS/BSS market it can be really difficult to stand out from the other products. Part of the reason we compiled The Blue Book OSS/BSS Vendor Directory was to allow us to quickly recall one product from another. With so much overlapping functionality and similarities in their names, some vendors can "blend" into each other when we try to…

08/04/2021 No Comments

Uses of OSS Augmented Reality in the Data Centre

I was doing some research on Ubiquiti's NMS/OSS tools yesterday and stumbled upon the brilliant Augmented Reality (AR) capability that it has (I think). I've converted to a video shown below (apologies for the low-res - you can try clicking here for Ubiquiti's full-res view) I especially love how it uses the OLED at the left side of the chassis almost like a QR code to…

24/03/2021 No Comments

010 – Building Next-Generation Situational Awareness Operations Centres with David Nestic

You've possibly been inside a NOC (Network Operations Centre) and seen the video wall covered with network maps, activity / alarm / event lists and network health graphs. These OSS tools are the ultimate insurance policy for any organisation that runs a network. They help coordinate the activities to repair a network when the inevitable network outages and degradations happen. Our guest in this episode, David…

08/03/2021 No Comments

How To Optimise A Network Assurance GUI To Get Results

In the old-school world of network assurance, we just polled our network devices and aggregated all the events into an event list. But then our networks got bigger and too many events were landing in the list for our assurance teams to process. The next fix was to apply filters. For example, that meant dropping the Info and Warning messages because they weren't all that important…

02/03/2021 No Comments

009 – Managing OSS/BSS Transformation at a Mid-Tier Telco with Steven Cocchiarella

Much of the focus within OSS/BSS centres around the big-budget projects being done by the Tier-1 telcos. They get attention because there are lots of people involved, lots of OSS horsepower, with big, ambitious goals. But there's another part of the industry that doesn't tend to get so much public recognition - the mid-market telcos and utilities. These OSS/BSS tend to cover just as much scope.…

22/02/2021 No Comments

OSS Functionality – Is Your Focus In Anonymous Places?

Yesterday's article asked whether OSS tend to be anonymous and poorly designed and then compared how Jony Ive (who led the design of iPads, iPods, iPhones for Apple) might look at OSS design. Jony has described "going deep" - being big on focus, care and detail when designing products. The article looked at 8 care factors, some of which OSS vendors do very well and others,…

19/02/2021 No Comments

OSS – Are they anonymous, poorly made objects?

"We're surrounded by anonymous, poorly made objects. It's tempting to think its because the people who use them don't care - just like the people who make them. But what [Apple has] shown is that people do care. It's not just about aesthetics. They care about things that are thoughtfully conceived and well made."Jony Ive (referenced here). As you undoubtedly know, Jony Ive is the industrial…

18/02/2021 2 Comments

008 – Making OSS Mega Projects Happen with Ashley Neale

While it might sometimes feel like OSS mega projects just happen, there's usually a lot that must first play out up-stream, long before us technologists get the chance to design and build. First someone must spawn the idea, then be able to persuade a bunch of other people, exciting them with the possibilities of the idea. In many cases, this happens on the customer-side with OSS…

17/02/2021 No Comments

Treating OSS Products as Your Own

I was listening to a podcast this morning and the host mentioned a concept that he calls "treating products as your own." In other words, there are certain products that he's an evangelist for - he actively spruiks them as if he had shares in the company or developed the products himself. They're products he loves so much that he's willing to tell everyone about even…

10/02/2021 No Comments

How to Design an OSS / Telco Data Governance Framework

"Data governance constructs a strategy and a framework through which an organization (company as well as a state…) can recognize the value of its data assets (towards its own or global goals), implement a data management system that can best leverage it whilst putting in place controls, policies and standards that simultaneously protect data (regulation & laws), ensure its quality and consistency, and make it readily…

09/02/2021 No Comments

007 – Building Products to Solve Fundamental OSS Problems with Jay Fenton

Jay Fenton is the Founder and CEO of Savvi, makers of innovative and highly performant OSS/BSS components that redefine the state of the art. Savvi's portfolio notably includes SNMP, Streaming Telemetry, Netflow and IoT collectors each of which operate in the 10s of millions of events per second on a single server, solving collection problems for massive networks. We also mention Luna - a unique visualisation…

09/02/2021 No Comments

006 – A Career of Innovation in OSS with Francis Haysom

Francis Haysom is a Principal Analyst for Appledore Research Group, a global research and consulting firm specialising in the telecommunication and software markets with a particular focus on OSS/BSS. In this episode, Francis takes us on a ride through his career leading OSS/BSS innovation across the last three decades with iconic companies such as Convergys, Cramer, Amdocs, Telcordia and Ericsson. He then takes us into his…

01/02/2021 No Comments

005 – Making Standardised Open-Source a Strategy for OSS with Vance Shipley

Vance Shipley is the CEO and Founder of SigScale. SigScale is a provider of standardised, open-source, cloud-native OSS/BSS tools, including flagship product, OCS (Online Charging System). In this episode, Vance takes us on a fascinating journey through a career that started three decades ago with his first role as a high-tech lumberjack through to his current owner / developer role with SigScale. His journey follows an…

26/01/2021 No Comments

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