Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

OSS / BSS in the clouds

Have you noticed the recent up-tick in headlines around telco offerings by hyperscalers AWS, Google and Microsoft? Or the multi-cloud telco models, the middleware, supplied by VMware and Red Hat? Whilst previous generations of wireless connectivity have focussed on voice and data capabilities, 5G is architected to better enable consumer business models. Edge compute (both on-prem / device-edge and provider edge) and related services to support…

20/07/2020 1 Comment

OSS/BSS Testing – The importance of test data

Today's is the third part in a series about OSS/BSS testing (part 1, part 2). Many people think about OSS/BSS testing in terms of application functionality and non-functional requirements. They also think about entry criteria / pre-requisites such as the environments, application builds / releases, test case development and maybe even the integrations required. However, an often overlooked aspect of OSS/BSS functionality testing is the data…

25/03/2020 No Comments

OSS/BSS Testing – Transitions

One of the most vital, but underestimated aspect of OSS/BSS project implementation is ensuring momentum is maintained. These large and complex projects are prone to stagnating at different stages, which can introduce pressure onto the implementation team. As mentioned in yesterday's post, the first in this week's series, the test strategy and scheduling is regularly overlooked as a means of maintaining OSS project momentum. More specifically,…

24/03/2020 No Comments

OSS/BSS Testing – the V-Model

On major software projects like the OSS you’re building, testing is an important phase of course. You’ll have undoubtedly incorporated testing into your planning. After all, testing is a key component of any Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). There are various SDLC models / methodologies such as Waterfall, V-Model, Agile and others that you can consider. Unfortunately, most OSS project teams tend to underestimate the testing…

23/03/2020 No Comments

Getting confused by key Assurance metrics?

Are you a bit slow like me and sometimes have to stop and think to differentiate your key assurance metrics like your MTTRs from your MTBFs? If so, I thought this useful diagram from researchgate.net might help The metrics are: MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) - the average elapsed time between failures of a system, service or device. It's the basic measure of availability / reliability…

17/03/2020 No Comments

The common data store trend (part 2)

Last month we posted an article that described using a common data model (CDM) for our OSS / BSS data. It mostly looked at the situation within the context of typical operational data sources (the blue boxes on the left side of the diagram below): Today's article pushes the vision a little further. If your CDM is built as part of an enterprise-wide data warehouse, then…

16/03/2020 No Comments

An OSS Security Summary

Please note that this article has now been superseded by this page "How to Architect Your OSS/BSS/NMS Security Framework" =========== Our OSS / BSS manage some of the world's most vital comms infrastructure don't they? That makes them pretty important assets to protect from cyber-intrusion. Therefore security is a key, but often underestimated, component of any OSS / BSS project. Let me start by saying…

09/03/2020 No Comments

Industry News: Netcracker and Google Cloud announce strategic partnership

Breaking news: "Netcracker and Google Cloud announce strategic partnership" has been published on our Industry News stream. Industry News includes: contract wins, new product releases, job openings, EOIs/RFPs, etc. To publish news about your organisation, first claim or register your organisation’s listing on The Blue Book OSS/BSS Supplier Directory then create a news post.

08/03/2020 No Comments

The overlaps of DCIM with inventory, asset and config management

A regular reader of the PAOSS blog recently wrote, "I follow with passion your blog,latest post about Inventory are great [Ed. the reader is talking about this post about LNI and PNI and this one about Inventory vs Asset vs CMDB Management]. I ask you if possible have a post on Inside Plant vs Outside Plant vs Virtual network creation... we usually use CAD based tool…

24/02/2020 No Comments

The common data store trend

Some time back, we discussed A modern twist on OSS architecture that is underpinned by a common data model. Time to discuss this a little more visually. As the blue boxes on the left side of the diagram below show, you may have many different data sources (some master, some slaved). You may have a single OSS tool (monolithic solution) or you may have…

21/02/2020 No Comments

Softwarisation of 5G

As you have undoubtedly noticed, 5G is generating quite a bit of buzz in telco and OSS circles. For many it's just an n+1 generation of mobile standards, where n is currently 4 (well, the number of recent introductions into the market mean n is probably now getting closer to 5 :) ). But 5G introduces some fairly big changes from an OSS perspective. As usual…

20/02/2020 2 Comments

An Asset Management / Inventory trick

Last week we discussed the nuances between Inventory, Asset and Config Management within an OSS stack. Each one of these tools are designed to supports functionality for different users / persona-groups. However, they also tend to have significant functional overlap. Chances are your organisation doesn't have separate dedicated tools for each. So today I'm going to share a trick I've used in the past when I've…

17/02/2020 No Comments

The differences between Inventory, Asset and Config Management in an OSS

We recently discussed the differences between PNI (Physical Network Inventory) and LNI (Logical Network Inventory) solutions that appear as part of many OSS (Operational Support System) stacks. As promised, today we'll talk about the subtle differences between: Network Inventory Management Systems Asset Management Systems and Configuration Management Databases (CMDB) We even discuss: Virtual Infrastructure (VIM) and Resource Managers Config Managers (different from CMDB) TM Forum's four…

14/02/2020 4 Comments

Bleak sentiments

"People in a tough spot often focus on their own problems, when the answer usually lies in fixing someone else’s."Steve Schwarzman. The telco industry is in a tough spot in many areas around the globe. Sadly, there were more stories of wholesale retrenchments here in Australia this week, including good friends. Revenues falling. Sentiment bleak. Yet it's not like most declining industries. Telecom services and remote…

11/02/2020 No Comments

Hello Trouble!

Hello, Trouble. It's been a while since we last met. But I know you're still out there. And I have a feeling you're looking for me. You wish I'd forget ya.. Don't ya trouble? Perhaps it is you, that has forgotten me. Perhaps I need to come find you. Remind you, who I am. Sounds like an apt mindset for working in the OSS industry doesn't…

10/02/2020 No Comments

OSS discovers a network

Following yesterday's post about OSS Inventory, I received another great follow-up question from another avid reader of the PAOSS blog: "Interesting thoughts Ryan! In addition to 'faults up', perhaps there is a case also (obvious?) for 'discovery up' to capture ongoing non-planned changes? Wondering have you come across any sort of reconciliation / adaptive inventory patterns like this? Workflow based? Autonomous? (Going to far into chaos…

04/02/2020 2 Comments

Various forms of OSS Inventory

After reading other recent posts such as "Orders Down, Faults Up" and "How is OSS/BSS service and resource availability supposed to work?" an avid reader of the PAOSS blog posed the following brilliant question: "Do you have any thoughts on geospatial vs non geospatial network inventory systems? How often do you see physical plant mapping in a separate system from network inventory, with linkages or integrations…

03/02/2020 2 Comments

In need of an OSS transformation translator

As OSS Architects, we have an array of elegant frameworks to call upon when designing our transformational journeys - from current state to a target state architecture. For example, when providing data mapping, we have tools to prepare current and/or target-state data diagrams such as the following: Source here. These diagrams are really elegant and powerful for communicating with other data experts and delivery teams. It's…

29/01/2020 No Comments

New functionality added to Blue Book OSS/BSS Vendor Directory

We're excited to announce the release of some new functionality on The Blue Book OSS/BSS Vendor Directory (which now hosts nearly 450 different OSS/BSS supplier listings). We've introduced: An Industry News feed If you wish to publish news / press-releases on products, contract wins, changes in ownership structure, job advertisements, tradeshow attendance or any other related news, you can click here to create a news item (note that…

20/01/2020 No Comments

Orders down, faults up (and the TMN Pyramid)

As mentioned in a post about Service and Resource Availability last week, I do tend to think of OSS workflows around an “orders down, faults up,” flow direction. And that means customers (services) at the top, network (resources) at the bottom of the (TMN) pyramid [see more about the TMN pyramid reference at the end of this article]. OSS/BSS Data Flows I also think of inventory…

14/01/2020 No Comments

Setting a challenge for clever OSS Architects

Back in the old days, there was really only one OSS build model - via big milestone/functionality delivery. You followed a waterfall style delivery where you designed the end-solution up-front, then tried to build, test and handover to that design. The business value was delivered at the end of the project (or perhaps major phases along the way). For the large operators, there may have been…

13/01/2020 2 Comments

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