I've recently started reading a book called Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work. To completely over-generalise the subject matter, it's about finding optimal performance states, aka finding flow. Not the normal topic of conversation for here on the PAOSS blog!! However, the book's content has helped to make the link between flow and…
Read More »ONAP Doubles-Down on Deployments, Drives Commercial Activity Across Open Source Networking Stack with ‘Dublin’ Release. ONAP’s fourth release, Dublin, brings an uptick in commercial activity – including new deployment plans from major operators (including Deutsche Telekom, KDDI, Swisscom, Telecom Italia, and Telstra) and ONAP-based products and solutions from more than a dozen leading vendors – and has become the focal point for industry alignment around management…
Read More »Operators have developed many unique understandings of what impacts the health of their networks. For example, mobile operators know that they have faster maintenance cycles in coastal areas than they do in warm, dry areas (yes, due to rust). Other operators have a high percentage of faults that are power-related. Others are impacted by failures caused by lightning strikes. Near-real-time weather pattern and lightning strike data…
Read More »"The hotel group Marriott International has been told by the UK Information Commissioner's Office that it will be fined a little over £99 million (A$178 million) over a data breach that occurred in December last year... This is the second fine for data breaches announced by the ICO on successive days. On Monday, it said British Airways would be fined £183.39 million (A$329.1 million) for a…
Read More »TM Forum's Open Digital Architecture (ODA) White Paper begins with the following statement: Telecoms is at a crucial turning point. The last decade has dealt a series of punishing blows to an industry that had previously enjoyed enviable growth for more than 20 years. Services that once returned high margins are being reduced to commodities in the digital world, and our insatiable appetite for data demands…
Read More »Fault / Alarm management tools have lots of strings to their functionality bows to help operators focus in on the target/s that matter most. ITU-T's recommendation X.733 provided an early framework and common model for classification of alarms. This allowed OSS vendors to build a standardised set of filters (eg severity, probable cause, etc). ITU-T's recommendation M.3703 then provided a set of guiding use cases for…
Read More »Sadly, I've just heard about the passing of John Reilly, a distinguished fellow of the TM Forum and giant of our industry. As the fellowship suggests, John was a significant contributor to some of the TM Forum's most significant and enduring works. Unfortunately I never had the chance to meet John in person, but he was always happy to field my questions regarding the nuances of…
Read More »What are the key features / functions of an OSS and BSS? You may recall a recent article that provided a discussion around the demarcation between OSS and BSS, which included the following graph: Note that this mapping is just my demarc interpretation, but isn't the definitive guide. It's definitely open to differing opinions (ie religious wars). Many of you will be familiar with the framework…
Read More »In a recent article, we talked about Network Service Assurance (NSA) in an environment where network virtualisation exists. One of the benefits of virtualisation or NaaS (Network as a Service) is that it provides a layer of programmability to your network. That is, to be able to instantiate network services by software through a network API. Virtualisation also tends to assume/imply that there is a huge…
Read More »Let me start today with a question: Does your future OSS/BSS need to be drastically different to what it is today? Please leave me a comment below, answering yes or no. I'm going to take a guess that most OSS/BSS experts will answer yes to this question, that our future OSS/BSS will change significantly. It's the reason I wrote the OSS Call for Innovation manifesto some…
Read More »Let's start with the last one first - DBA. In the context of OSS/BSS, DBA has multiple meanings but I think the most relevant is Death By Acronym (don't worry all you Database Administrators out there, I haven't forgotten about you). Our industry is awash with TLAs (Three-Letter Acronyms) that lead to DBA. Having said that, today's article is about seven that are commonly used in…
Read More »I spent some time with a client going through their OSS/BSS yesterday. They're an Australian telco with a primarily home-grown, browser-based OSS/BSS. One of its features was something I've never seen in an OSS/BSS before. But really quite subtle and cool. They have four tiers of users: Super-admins (the carrier's in-house admins), Standard (their in-house users), Partners (they use many channel partners to sell their services),…
Read More »Network slicing allows operators to segment their network and configure each different slice to the specific needs of that customer (or group of customers). So rather than the network infrastructure being configured for the best compromise that suits all use-cases, instead each slice can be configured optimally for each use-case. That's an exciting concept. The big potential roadblock however, falls almost entirely on our OSS/BSS. If…
Read More »Back in the old days, Network Service Assurance probably had a different meaning than it might today. Clearly it's assurance of a network service. That's fairly obvious. But it's in the definition of "network service" where the old and new terminologies have the potential to diverge. In years past, telco networks were "nailed up" and network functions were physical appliances. I would've implied (probably incorrectly, but…
Read More »There's a famous Zig Ziglar quote that goes something like, "You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want." You could safely assume that this was written for the individual reader, but there is some truth in it within the OSS context too. For the OSS designer, builder, integrator, does the statement "You can have…
Read More »In earlier posts, we've talked about using Netflix's chaos monkey approach as a way of getting to Zero Touch Assurance (ZTA). The chaos monkeys intentionally trigger faults in the network as a means of ensuring resilience. Not just for known degradation / outage events, but to unknown events too. I'd like to introduce the concept of CT/IR - Continual Test / Incremental Resilience. Analogous to CI/CD…
Read More »Some of the world's leading OSS thinkers met at TM Forum's Digital Transformation World in Nice, France, this week. Were you one of them? I was unable to attend due to a date with a surgeon (no, not the romantic kind of date). If you attended, I'd love to live vicariously through you and hear your key takeaways from the event. Please leave us a comment below, either…
Read More »After Telstra's NaaS (Network as a Service) program won a TM Forum excellence award, I promised yesterday to share a post that describes why I'm so excited about the concept of NaaS. As the title suggests above, NaaS has the potential to be as big a paradigm shift for networks (and OSS/BSS) as Agile has been for software development. There are many facets to the Agile…
Read More »On Monday evening in Nice, TM Forum announced the list of 12 Excellence Awards for 2019. They also anointed Distinguished Fellow and Distinguished Engineer status on two of the industry's leading contributors. Huge congratulations to each of the following award winners: Business Transformation – Royal KPN, Vlocity and Salesforce IT Transformation – China Mobile & Huawei Operational Transformation & Agility – Netcracker Network Transformation – Telstra…
Read More »Over the years, I've been asked the question many times, "what's the difference between OSS (Operational Support Systems) and BSS (Business Support Systems)?" I've also been asked, albeit slightly less regularly, how OSS and BSS map to TM Forum standards like the TAM (the Application Map) and eTOM (enhanced Telecommunications Operations Map). To my knowledge, TM Forum has never attempted to map OSS vs BSS. It…
Read More »OSS projects are full of risks. We all know it. OSS projects have "earned" a bad name because of all those risks. On the other side of that same coin, OSS projects disappoint, in part I suspect because stakeholders expect such big things from their resource investments. Ask anyone familiar with OSS projects and you'll be sure to hear a long list of failings. For those…
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