Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

How to build a personal, cloud-native OSS sandpit

As a project for 2019, we're considering the development of a how-to training course that provides a step-by-step guide to build your own OSS sandpit to play with. It will be built around cloud-native and open-source components. It will be cutting-edge and micro-scaled (but highly scalable in case you want to grow it). Does this sound like something you'd be interested in hearing more about? Like…

20/12/2018 6 Comments

GE undergoes another re-structure. Does it unlock a competitive advantage?

GE has just announced plans to establish a new, independent company focused on building a comprehensive Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) software portfolio. The spun out company will "start with $1.2 billion in annual software revenue and an existing global industrial customer base. The company is intended to be a GE wholly-owned, independently run business with a new brand and identity, its own equity structure, and…

18/12/2018 No Comments

What to read from a simple little OSS job advertisement from AWS

Not sure if you noticed, but AWS posted this job advertisement on LinkedIn a couple of days ago - Business Portfolio Leader – Telecom OSS/BSS Solutions. The advertisement includes the following text: "Amazon Web Services (AWS) is leading the next paradigm shift in computing and is looking for a world class candidate to manage an elite portfolio of strategic AWS technology partners focused on the Operation…

17/12/2018 No Comments

How to kill the OSS RFP (part 4)

This is the fourth, and final part (I think) in the series on killing the OSS RFI/RFP process, a process that suppliers and customers alike find to be inefficient. The concept is based on an initiative currently being investigated by TM Forum. The previous three posts focused on the importance of trusted partnerships and the methods to develop them via OSS procurement events. Today's post takes…

14/12/2018 1 Comment

How to kill the OSS RFP (part 3)

As the title suggests, this is the third in a series of articles spawned by TM Forum's initiative to investigate better procurement practices than using RFI / RFP processes. There's no doubt the RFI / RFP / contract model can be costly and time-consuming. To be honest, I feel the RFI / RFP process can be a reasonably good way of evaluating and identifying a new…

13/12/2018 No Comments

How to kill the OSS RFP (part 2)

Yesterday's post discussed an initiative that TM Forum is currently investigating - trying to identify an alternate OSS procurement process to the traditional RFI/RFP/contract approach. It spoke about trusting partnerships being the (possibly) mythological key to killing off the RFP. Have you noticed how much fear there is going into any OSS procurement event? Fear from suppliers and customers alike. That's understandable because there are so…

12/12/2018 No Comments

How to kill the OSS RFP

TM Forum is currently investigating ways to procure OSS without resorting to the current RFI / RFP approach. It has published the following survey results. . As it shows, the RFI / RFP isn't fit for purpose for suppliers and customers alike. It's not just the RFI/RFP process. We could extend this further and include contract / procurement process that bolts onto the back of the…

11/12/2018 No Comments

Why does everyone know an operator’s business better than the operator?

The headline today blatantly steals from a post by William Webb. You can read his entire, brilliant post here. All quotes below are from the article. William's concept aligns quite closely with yesterday's article regarding external insights that don't quite marry up with the real situation faced by operators. "At the Great Telco Debate this week there was no shortage of advice for operators. Some counselled…

06/12/2018 No Comments

OSS answers that are simple but wrong vs complex but right

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills..." John F Kennedy. Let's face it. The business of running a telco is complex. The business of implementing an OSS is complex. The excitement about…

05/12/2018 2 Comments

Accenture helps Telefónica with CX

Accenture Helps Telefónica Transform the Customer Experience. Accenture has helped Telefónica, one of the world’s largest private telecommunications companies, transform its customer experience with a complete overhaul of its digital experience for customers in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Spain and the U.K. To acquire and retain new customers, Telefónica had to rethink its commercial focus and create a new, seamless and personalized omnichannel experience. Accenture Interactive helped…

05/12/2018 No Comments

The Theory of Evolution, OSS evolution

"Evolution says that biological change is a property of populations — that every individual is a trial run of an experimental combination of traits, and that at the end of the trial, you are done and discarded, and the only thing that matters is what aggregate collection of traits end up in the next generation. The individual is not the focus, the population is. And that’s…

04/12/2018 No Comments

Thump thump clap

I recently watched the film Bohemian Rhapsody about Freddy Mercury and the band Queen. The title of this blog refers to the sounds made by the band at the start of their song, "We Will Rock You." There was a scene in the movie showing the origins of Thump Thump Clap, with the band adding it into the song purely to engage their fans more in…

03/12/2018 No Comments

MYCOM OSI acquired by Inflexion

MYCOM OSI acquired to accelerate cloud-based service assurance leadership. MYCOM OSI, provider of Assurance, Automation and Analytics solutions to the world’s largest Communications Service Providers (CSPs), announced that it has been acquired by leading private equity firm Inflexion, to fuel its growth and capitalize on its leadership position in a market that is transforming from 30 years of traditional legacy OSS solutions to state-of-the art cloud-based…

30/11/2018 No Comments

That’s not where to disrupt your OSS

The diagram below comes from an actual client's functionality usage profile. The x-axis shows the functionality / use-cases. The y-axis shows the number of uses (it could equally represent usefulness or value). Each big-impact demand (ie individual bars on the left-side of the graph) warrants separate investigation. The bars on the right side (ie the long tail in the red box) don't. They might be worth…

30/11/2018 No Comments

The OSS proof-of-worth dilemma

Earlier this week we posted an article describing Sutton's Law of OSS, which effectively tells us to go where the money is. The article suggested that in OSS we instead tend towards the exact opposite - the inverse-Sutton - we go to where the money isn't. Instead of robbing banks like Willie Sutton, we break into a cemetery and aimlessly look for the cash register. A…

29/11/2018 No Comments

OSS’ Rosetta Stone

When working on OSS projects, I find that linking or reference keys are so valuable at so many levels. Not just data management within the OSS database, but project management, design activities, task assignment / delivery, etc. People might call things all sorts of different names, which leads to confusion. It seems like every single one of us is talking in a different dialect of OSS.…

28/11/2018 No Comments

Sutton’s Law of OSS

Willie Sutton was an accomplished bank robber, particularly during the 1920s and 1930. Named after Willie, Sutton's Law effectively states, "I go to where the money is," which was supposedly Sutton's response to a reporter's question asking why he robbed banks instead of easier targets. Interestingly for the OSS industry, we seem to follow the inverse of Sutton's Law. We go to where the money isn't.…

26/11/2018 No Comments

Cannibalisation intrigues me

We've all heard the Kodak story. They invented digital cameras but stuck them in a drawer because it was going to cannibalise their dominant position in the photographic film revenue stream... eventually leading to bankruptcy. Swisscom invented an equivalent of WhatsApp years before WhatsApp came onto the market. It allowed users (only Swisscom users, not external / global customers BTW) to communicate via a single app…

23/11/2018 4 Comments

The Jeff Bezos prediction for OSS

"If we start to focus on ourselves, instead of focusing on our customers, that will be the beginning of the end ... We have to try and delay that day for as long as possible." Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos recently predicted that Amazon is likely to fail and/or go bankrupt at some point in time, as history has eventually proven for most high-flying companies. The quote…

22/11/2018 No Comments

The culture required to support Telkomsel’s OSS/BSS transformation

Yesterday's post described the ways in which Telkomsel has strategically changed their value-chain to attract revenues with greater premiums than the traditional model of a telco. They've used a new digital core and an API framework to help facilitate their business model transformation. As promised yesterday, we'll take a slightly closer look at the culture of Telkomsel's transformation today. Monty Hong of Telkomsel presented the following…

20/11/2018 No Comments

How OSS/BSS facilitated Telkomsel’s structural revenue changes

The following two slides were presented by Monty Hong of Indonesia's Telkomsel at Digital Transformation Asia 2018 last week. They provide a fascinating insight into the changing landscape of comms revenues that providers are grappling with globally and the associated systems decisions that Telkomsel has made. The first shows the drastic declines in revenues from Telkomsel's traditional telco products (orange line), contrasted with the rapid rise…

19/11/2018 No Comments

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