Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

“The Blue Book OSS/BSS Vendor Directory” from Passionate About OSS has officially launched

We're excited to announce that “The Blue Book OSS/BSS Vendor Directory” has officially gone live here at https://passionateaboutoss.com/directory It provides a comprehensive directory of over 400 suppliers that produce OSS, BSS and/or related network management tools. Company details, product details and functionality classifications are included. Every network operator has a unique set of needs from their operational software – software that includes OSS (Operational Support Systems),…

07/10/2019 No Comments

A lighter-touch OSS procurement approach (part 3)

We've spoken at length about TM Forum’s, “Time to kill the RFP? Reinventing IT procurement for the 2020s,” report so far this week. We've also spoken about the feeling that the OSS/BSS RFP (Request For Proposal) still has relevance in some situations... as long as it's more of a lighter-touch than most. We've spoken about a more pragmatic approach that aims to find best available fit…

06/10/2019 No Comments

A lighter-touch OSS procurement approach (part 2)

Yesterday's post described the approach to get from 400+ possible OSS/BSS suppliers/products down to a more manageable list without: Having to get into significant discussions with vendors (yet) Gathering all your stakeholders together to prepare a detailed list of requirements We'll call this "the long list," which might consist of 5-20 suppliers. We use this evaluation technique (which we'll share more about on Monday) to ensure…

05/10/2019 No Comments

A lighter-touch OSS procurement approach (part 1)

You may have noticed that we've run a series of posts about OSS/BSS procurement, and about the RFP process by association. One of the first steps in the traditional procurement process is preparing a strategy and detailed set of requirements. As TM Forum's, “Time to kill the RFP? Reinventing IT procurement for the 2020s,” report describes: "Before an RFP can be issued, the CSP’s IT or network…

04/10/2019 No Comments

Do I support the death penalty (of OSS RFPs)? Hmmm….

As per yesterday's post, I'll continue to reference a TM Forum report called, "Time to kill the RFP? Reinventing IT procurement for the 2020s" today. Mark Newman and the team have captured and discussed so many layers to the OSS/BSS procurement process. There's no doubt the current stereotypical RFP approach to procurement is broken. It needs to be done differently. That's why we have been doing…

03/10/2019 No Comments

Lobbying hard for the death penalty for OSS RFPs

Earlier this year, the TM Forum published a really insightful report called, "Time to kill the RFP? Reinventing IT procurement for the 2020s." There are so many layers to the OSS/BSS procurement discussion and Mark Newman and team have done a fantastic job of capturing them. We'll expand on a few of those layers in a series of posts this week. For example, section 2 articulates…

02/10/2019 No Comments

OSS/BSS procurement is flawed from the outset

The industry we work in is worth tens of billions of dollars annually. We rely on that investment to fund the OSS/BSS projects (and ops/maintenance tasks) that keeps many thousands of us busy. Those funds originate from project sponsors in the buyers' organisations taking a leap of faith in kicking off an OSS project. For many of the big projects, sponsors are obliged to involve the…

01/10/2019 No Comments

OSS that make men feel more masculine and in command

"From watching ESPN, I'd learned about the power of information bombardment. ESPN strafes its viewers with an almost hysterical amount of data and details. Scrolling boxes. Panels. Bars. Graphics. Multi-angle camera perspectives. When exposed to a surfeit of data, men tend to feel more masculine and in command. Do most men bother to decipher these boxes, panels, bars and graphics? No - but that's not really…

19/09/2019 No Comments

Moving from traditional assurance to AIOps, what are the differences?

We're going to look into assurance models of the past versus the changing assurance demands that are appearing these days. The diagrams below are highly stylised for discussion purposes so they're unlikely to reflect actual implementations, but we'll get to that. Under the old model, the heart of the OSS/BSS was the database (almost exclusively a relational database). It would gather data, via probes/MDDs/collectors, from the…

18/09/2019 No Comments

Is your service assurance really service assurance?? (Part 6)

Seems this post from last week has triggered some really interesting debate - Is your service assurance really service assurance?? (Part 5). It was a post that looked into collecting end-to-end service metrics rather than our traditional method of collecting network device events/metrics and trying to reverse-engineer to form a service-level perspective. Thought I'd give you an update. I'm thinking along the following lines, but admit…

10/09/2019 No Comments

Going to the OSS zoo

"There's the famous quote that if you want to understand how animals live, you don't go to the zoo, you go to the jungle. The Future Lab has really pioneered that within Lego, and it hasn't been a theoretical exercise. It's been a real design-thinking approach to innovation, which we've learned an awful lot from." Jorgen Vig Knudstorp. This quote prompted me to ask the question…

09/09/2019 No Comments

Is your service assurance really service assurance?? (Part 5)

In yesterday's fourth part of this series about modern network service assurance, we wrote this: I also just stumbled upon OpenTelemetry, an open source project designed to capture traces / metrics / logs from apps / microservices. It intrigued me because just as you have the concept of traces / metrics / logs for apps, you similarly have traces / metrics / logs for networks. In…

06/09/2019 No Comments

Is your service assurance really service assurance?? (Part 4)

Yesterday's post introduced the concept of active measurements as the better method for monitoring and assuring customer services. Like the rest of this series, it borrowed from an interesting white paper from the Netrounds team titled, “Reimagining Service Assurance in the Digital Service Provider Era.” Interestingly, I also just stumbled upon OpenTelemetry, an open source project designed to capture traces / metrics / logs from apps /…

05/09/2019 No Comments

Is your service assurance really service assurance?? (Part 3)

Yep, this is the third part, so that might suggest that there were two lead-up articles prior to this one. Well, you'd be right: The first proposed that most of what we refer to as "service assurance" is really only "network infrastructure" assurance. The second then looked at the constraints we face in trying to reverse-engineer "network infrastructure" assurance into data that will allow us to…

04/09/2019 No Comments

Is your service assurance really service assurance?? (Part 2)

In yesterday's article, we asked whether what many know as service assurance can rightfully be called service assurance. Yesterday's, like today's, post was inspired by an interesting white paper from the Netrounds team titled, "Reimagining Service Assurance in the Digital Service Provider Era." Below are three insightful tables from the Netrounds white paper: Table 1 looks at the typical components (systems) that service assurance is comprised…

03/09/2019 No Comments

Is your service assurance really service assurance??

I just came across an interesting white paper from the Netrounds team titled, "Reimagining Service Assurance in the Digital Service Provider Era." You can find a copy here. It's well worth a read, so much so that I'll unpack a few of the concepts it contains in a series of articles this week. It rightly points out that, "Alarms and fault management are what most people…

02/09/2019 2 Comments

OSS Persona 10:10:10 Mapping

We sometimes attack OSS/BSS planning at a quite transactional level. For example, think about the process of gathering detailed requirements at the start of a project. They tend to be detailed and transactional don't they? This type of requirement gathering is more like the WHAT and HOW rings in Simon Sinek's Golden Circle. Just curious, do you have a persona map that shows all of the…

30/08/2019 No Comments

Three OSS project responsibility sliders

Last week we shared an article that talked about the different expectations from suppliers and clients when undertaking an OSS implementation project. The diagram below attempts to demonstrate the concept visually, in the form of three important sliders. When it comes to the technical delivery, it makes sense that most of the responsibility falls upon the supplier. They obviously have the greater know-how from building and…

29/08/2019 1 Comment

OSS user heat-mapping

Over the many OSS implementation projects I've worked on, UI/UX (user interface / user experience) has been an afterthought (if even thought about at all). I know there are OSS UI/UX experts out there (I've met a handful), but none have ever been assigned to the projects I've worked on unfortunately. UI has always just been the domain of the developer. If the functionality worked (even…

27/08/2019 No Comments

This OSS is different to what I’m used to

OSS implementations / transformations are always challenging. Stakeholders seem to easily get their heads around the fact that there will be technical challenges (even if they / we can't always get their head around the actual changes initially). When a supplier is charged with doing an OSS implementation, the client (perhaps rightly) expects the supplier to lead the technical implementation and guide the client through any…

21/08/2019 No Comments

A modern twist on OSS architecture

I was speaking with a friend today about an old OSS assurance product that is undergoing a refresh and investment after years of stagnation. He indicated that it was to come with about 20 out of the box adaptors for data collection. I found that interesting because it was replacing a product that probably had in excess of 100 adaptors. Seemed like a major backward step...…

20/08/2019 No Comments

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