Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

What’s the one big factor holding back your OSS? And the exercise to reduce it

We've talked about some of the emotions we experience in the OSS industry earlier this week, the trauma of OSS and anxiety relating to OSS. To avoid these types of miserable feelings, it's human nature to seek to limit them. We over-analyse, we over-specify, we over-engineer, we over-document, we over-contract, we over-react, we over-estimate (nah, actually we almost never over-estimate do we?), we over-resource (well, actually,…

08/02/2019 No Comments

Identifying the fault-lines that trigger OSS churn

"Most people slog through their days in a dark funk. They almost never get to do anything interesting or go to interesting places or meet interesting people. They are ignored by marketers who want them to buy their overpriced junk and be grateful for it. They feel disrespected, unappreciated and taken for granted. Nobody wants to take the time to listen to their fears, dreams, hopes…

07/02/2019 No Comments

Addressing the trauma of OSS

"You also have to understand their level of trauma. Your product, service or information is selling a solution to someone who is in trauma. There are different levels, from someone who needs a nail to finish the swing set in their backyard to someone who just found out they have a life-threatening disease. All of your customers had something happen in their life, where the problem…

06/02/2019 No Comments

The TMN model suffers from modern network anxiety

As the TMN diagram below describes, each layer up in the network management stack abstracts but connects (as described in more detail in “What an OSS shouldn’t do“). That is, each higher layer reduces the amount if information/control within a domain that it’s responsible for, but it assumes a broader responsibility for connecting multiple domains together. There's just one problem with the diagram. It's a little dated when we take…

05/02/2019 No Comments

OSS data that’s even more useless than useless

About 6-8 years ago, I was becoming achingly aware that I'd passed well beyond an information overload (I-O) threshold. More information was reaching my brain each day than I was able to assimilate, process and archive. What to do? Well, I decided to stop reading newspapers and watching the news, in fact almost all television. I figured that those information sources were empty calories for the…

04/02/2019 No Comments

Comarch supports creation of the IoT Ecosystem for SCSK

Comarch Supports Creation of the IoT Ecosystem for Japanese Enterprises on Behalf of SCSK. The SCSK Corporation, one of the largest system integrators in Japan, has chosen Comarch as a partner to enrich its portfolio with IoT device management and monetization capabilities. Comarch will deliver elements of its IoT ecosystem offer, and related solutions, in order to accelerate SCSK’s Internet of Things’ business in Japan. SCSK…

01/02/2019 No Comments

Zero Touch Assurance – ZTA (part 3)

This is the third in a series on ZTA, following on from yesterday's post that suggested intentionally triggering events to allow the accumulation of a much larger library of historical network data. Today we'll look at the impact of data collection on our ability to achieve ZTA and refer back to part 1 in the series too. Monitoring - There is monitoring the events that happen…

30/01/2019 No Comments

Zero Touch Assurance – ZTA (part 2)

Yesterday we described the three steps on the path to Zero Touch Assurance: Monitoring - Monitoring the events that happen in the network and responding manually Post-cognition - Monitoring events / trends that happen in the network, comparing them to past situations (using analytics to identify repeating patterns), using the past to recommend (or automate) a response Pre-cognition - Identification of events / trends that have…

29/01/2019 No Comments

Zero Touch Assurance – ZTA (part 1)

A couple of years ago, we published a series on pre-cognitive OSS based on the following quote by Ben Evans about three classes of search/discovery: There is giving you what you already know you want (Amazon, Google) There is working out what you want (Amazon and Google’s aspiration) And then there is suggesting what you might want (Heywood Hill). Today, I look to apply a similar model…

28/01/2019 No Comments

Becoming the Microsoft of the OSS industry

On Tuesday we pondered, "Would an OSS duopoly be a good thing?" It cited two examples of operating systems amongst other famous duopolies: Microsoft / Apple (PC operating systems) Google / Apple (smartphone operating systems) Yesterday we provided an example of why consolidation is so much more challenging for OSS companies than say for Coke or Pepsi. But maybe an operating system model could represent a…

24/01/2019 2 Comments

A sad example of the challenges facing OSS supplier consolidation

Yesterday's post, "Would an OSS duopoly be a good thing?" talked about the benefits and challenges of consolidation of the number of suppliers in the OSS market. I also promised that today I'll share an example of the types of challenge that can be faced. An existing OSS supplier (Company A) had developed a significant foot-hold in the T1 telco market around Asia. They had quite…

23/01/2019 No Comments

Accenture to offer ONAP-aaS

Accenture Extends Collaboration with ONAP to Help Communications Industry Accelerate Transformation to Software-Based Networks. Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has extended its collaboration with LF Networking (LFN) — which facilitates collaboration and operational excellence across open networking projects, including the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) — upgrading its membership to Gold level status as part of its strategy to build a comprehensive “as-a-service” solution for the software-defined ecosystem.…

23/01/2019 No Comments

Would an OSS duopoly be a good thing?

The products/vendors page here on PAOSS has a couple of hundred entries currently. We're currently working on an extended list that will almost double the number on it. More news on that shortly. The level of fragmentation fascinates me, but if I'm completely honest, it probably disappoints me too. It's great that it's providing the platform for a long-tail of innovation. It's exciting that there's so…

22/01/2019 No Comments

Do you have a nagging OSS problem you cannot solve?

On Friday, we published a post entitled, "Think for a moment..." which posed the question of whether we might be better-served looking back at our most important existing features and streamlining them rather than inventing new features to solve that have little impact. Over the weekend, a promotional email landed in my inbox from Nightingale Conant. It is completely unrelated to OSS, yet the steps outlined…

21/01/2019 No Comments

Juniper signs $325m deal with IBM

IBM Services Strikes Agreement with Juniper Networks to Speed its Journey to the Cloud. IBM Services announced a $325 million agreement with Juniper Networks in which IBM will assist the network technology giant in managing its existing infrastructure, applications and IT services to help reduce costs and enhance their journey to the cloud. According to a recent report from IBM's Institute for Business Value, nearly all…

18/01/2019 No Comments

Think for a moment…

“Many of the most important new companies, including Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Snapchat, Uber, Airbnb and more are winning not by giving good-enough solutions..., but rather by delivering a superior experience....” Ben Thompson, stratechery.com Think for a moment about the millions of developer hours that have gone into creating today's OSS tools. Think also for a moment about how many of those tools are really clunky…

18/01/2019 2 Comments

Nobody dabbles at dentistry

"There are some jobs that are only done by accredited professionals. And then there are most jobs, jobs that some people do for fun, now and then, perhaps in front of the bathroom mirror. It’s difficult to find your footing when you’re a logo designer, a comedian or a project manager. Because these are gigs that many people think they can do, at least a little…

17/01/2019 No Comments

To link or not to link your OSS. That is the question

The first OSS project I worked on had a full-suite, single vendor solution. All products within the suite were integrated into a single database and that allowed their product developers to introduce a lot of cross-linking. That has its strengths and weaknesses. The second OSS suite I worked with came from one of the world's largest network vendors and integrators. Their suite primarily consisted of third-party…

15/01/2019 2 Comments

Am I being an OSShole?

""Am I being an asshole?” In other words, am I pointing out problems or am I finding solutions?" Ramit Sethi. One of the things I've noticed working on large and small OSS teams is that people who excel at finding solutions thrive in both. The ones who thrive on only identifying problems seemingly only function in large organisations. In a small team, everyone needs to contribute…

14/01/2019 No Comments

IBM Unveils World’s First Quantum Computing System

IBM Unveils World's First Integrated Quantum Computing System for Commercial Use. At the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), IBM (NYSE: IBM) today unveiled IBM Q System One™, the world's first integrated universal approximate quantum computing system designed for scientific and commercial use. IBM also announced plans to open its first IBM Q Quantum Computation Center for commercial clients in Poughkeepsie, New York in 2019. IBM Q…

10/01/2019 No Comments

Treating your OSS/BSS suite like a share portfolio

Like most readers, I'm sure your OSS/BSS suite consists of many components. What if you were to look at each of those components as assets? In a share portfolio, you analyse your stocks to see which assets are truly worth keeping and which should be divested. We don't tend to take such a long-term analytical view of our OSS/BSS components. We may regularly talk about their…