Imagine for a moment that you're the coach of a sporting team. You train your team and provide them with a strategy for the game. You send them out onto the court and let them play. The scoreboard gives you all of the stats about each player. Their points, blocks, tackles, heart-rate, distance covered, errors, etc. But it doesn't show the total score for each team…
Read More »We talked yesterday about a range of OSS products that are more outcome-driven than our typically transactional OSS tools. There's not many of them around at this stage. I refer to them as "data bridge" products. Our typical OSS tools help manage transactions (alarms, activate customers services, etc). They're generally not so great at (directly) managing objectives such as: Sign up an extra 50,000 customers…
Read More »OSS tend to be very technical and transactional in nature. For example, a critical alarm happens, so we have to coordinate remedial actions as soon as possible. Or, a new customer has requested service so we have to coordinate the workforce to implement certain tasks in the physical and logical/virtual world. When you spend so much of your time solving transactional / tactical problems, you tend…
Read More »Yesterday's post discussed two waves of decisions stemming from our increasing obsession with data collection. "...the first wave had [arisen] because we'd almost all prefer to make data-driven decisions (ie decisions based on "proof") rather than "gut-feel" decisions. We're increasingly seeing a second wave come through - to use data not just to identify trends and guide our decisions, but to drive automated actions." Unfortunately, the…
Read More »Data collection and data science is becoming big business. Not just in telco - our OSS have always been one of the biggest data gatherers around - but across all sectors that are increasingly digitising (should I just say, "all sectors" because they're all digitising?). Why do you think we're so keen to collect so much data? I'm assuming that the first wave had mainly been…
Read More »Wednesday's post discussed how OPEX is forever, just like the slogan for diamonds. As discussed, some aspects of Operational Expenses are well known when kicking off a new OSS project (eg annual OSS license / support costs). Others can slip through the cracks - what I referred to as OPEX leakage (eg third-party software, ongoing maintenance of software customisations). OPEX leakage might be an…
Read More »Geoff Moore's seminal book, "Crossing the Chasm," described the psychological chasm between early buyers and the mainstream market. Seth Godin cites Moore's work, "Moore’s Crossing the Chasm helped marketers see that while innovation was the tool to reach the small group of early adopters and opinion leaders, it was insufficient to reach the masses. Because the masses don’t want something that’s new, they want something that…
Read More »Sourced from: www.couponraja.in I sometimes wonder whether OPEX is underestimated when considering OSS investments, or at least some facets (sorry, awful pun there!) of it. Cost-out (aka head-count reduction) seems to be the most prominent OSS business case justification lever. So that's clearly not underestimated. And the move to cloud is also an OPEX play in most cases, so it's front of mind during the procurement…
Read More »A few years ago I was lucky enough to be invited to lead a bid. I say lucky because the partner organisations are two of the most iconic firms in the tech industry. The bid was for bleeding-edge work, potentially worth well over a billion dollars. I was a little surprised to be honest. I mean, two tech titans, with many very, very clever people, much…
Read More »In a post last week we posed the question on whether Inventory Management still retains relevance. A friend recently posited that inventory tools are no longer relevant. I see where he's coming from but also tend to disagree (but with an open mind). IMHO There are certainly uses cases where inventory remains unquestionably needed. But perhaps others that are no longer required, a relic of…
Read More »"When experts are wrong, it's often because they're experts on an earlier version of the world." Paul Graham. OSS experts are often wrong. Not only because of the "earlier version of the world" paradigm mentioned above, but also the "parallel worlds" paradigm that's not explicitly mentioned. That is, they may be experts on one organisation's OSS (possibly from spending years working on it), but have…
Read More »OSS wear many hats and help many different functions within an organisation. One function that OSS assists might be surprising to some people - the CFO / Accounting function. The traditional service provider business model tends to be CAPEX-heavy, with significant investment required on physical infrastructure. Since assets need to be depreciated and life-cycle managed, Accountants have an interest in the infrastructure that our OSS manage…
Read More »I don't know about you, but I find this industry of ours has a remarkable ability to keep us humble. Barely a day goes by when I don't have to slap my forehead and say, "uhhh.... of course!" (or perhaps, "D'oh!!") I had one such instance yesterday. I couldn't figure out why a client's telemetry / performance-management suite needed an inventory ingestion interface. Can you think…
Read More »The following is a set of user stories I've provided to TM Forum to help with their current Autonomous Networking initiative. They're just an initial discussion point for others to riff off. We'd love to get your comments, additions and recommended refinements too. As a Head of Network Operations, I want to Automatically maintain the health of my network (within expected tolerances if necessary) So that…
Read More »At Passionate About OSS, we're lucky enough to count the utilities market as an important part of our client base. This probably puts us in a very small percentage of OSS exponents that work across OSS for telco and utilities. Utilities have a number of interesting and unique nuances compared with other OSS markets. Starting at the top, the network is core business for a telco,…
Read More »You've all probably seen this scene from the Tom Hanks movie, Apollo 13 right? But you're probably wondering what it has to do with OSS? Well, this scene came to mind when I was preparing a list of user stories required to facilitate Autonomous Networking. More specifically, to the use-case where we want the Autonomous Network to quickly recover (as best it can) from unplanned catastrophic…
Read More »I must've written dozens of posts about us needing to collectively invest a lot more effort into UI / UX. I've written quite a few over the last few months especially. This one in particular springs to mind. As an industry, we typically don't do user experience journeys (UX) or user interfaces (UI) very well at all yet. I know thousands of OSS experts, but only…
Read More »A slightly left-field thought dawned on me the other day and I'd like to hear your thoughts on it. We all know that almost all telemetry coming out of our networks is time-stamped. Events, syslogs, metrics, etc. That makes perfect sense because we look for time-based ripple-out effects when trying to diagnose issues. But therefore does it also make sense to geo-stamp telemetry data too? Just…
Read More »In yesterday's post, we talked about what needs to happen for a network operator to build an autonomous network. Many of the factors extended beyond the direct control of the OSS stack. We also looked at the difference between designing network autonomy for an existing OSS versus a ground-up build of an autonomous network. We mostly looked at the ground-up build yesterday (at the expense of…
Read More »....I want to make my network so observable, reliable, predictable and repeatable that I don't need anyone to operate it. That's clearly a highly ambitious goal. Probably even unachievable if we say it doesn't need anyone to run it. But I wonder whether this has to be the starting point we take on behalf of our network operator customers? If we look at most networks, OSS,…
Read More »"For those starting out in product, here's a tip: Design, Defaults*, Documentation, Details and Delivery really matter in software."Jeetu Patel here. * Note that you can interpret "Defaults" to be Out-Of-The-Box functionality offered by the product. Let's break those 5 D-words down and describe why they really matter to the OSS industry shall we? Design - The power of OSS product development tends to lie with…
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