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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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.…
Read More »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.…
Read More »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…
Read More »"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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »We've just finished the third and final day at TM Forum's Digital Transformation Asia (https://dta.tmforum.org and #tmfdigitalasia ). Wow, talk about a lot happening!! After spending the previous two days focusing on the lecture series, it would've been remiss of me to not catch up with the vendors and Catalyst presentations that had been on display for all three days. So that was my main focus…
Read More »RCN & Grande Expand Use of Netcracker Digital BSS With Active Mediation Deployment. Netcracker Technology announced that RCN & Grande Communications, U.S.-based telecommunications service providers, have expanded their BSS relationship with Netcracker and have gone live with Netcracker’s Active Mediation solution. The expanded BSS capabilities will enhance RCN’s & Grande’s existing use of Netcracker’s Revenue Management solution. RCN & Grande are leading, competitive cable providers focused…
Read More »X by Orange, the Ecosystem of Cloud Services for SMEs Launched by Orange Spain, to Implement the Comarch Billing Solution. Comarch has been selected by Orange Spain to implement a comprehensive BSS solution covering the full chain of billing, charging, and revenue functionalities. It will streamline the processes spanning from network data mining, through rating and charging, to delivery of financial documents and clearing payments. The…
Read More »Don't worry. The title of this post isn't a typo, but I'll get to that shortly. I've just had an interesting day 2 at TM Forum's Digital Transformation Asia (https://dta.tmforum.org and #tmfdigitalasia ). The quality of presentations was again quite high with further thought-provoking ideas!! My favorite session for the day was a panel discussion entitled, "Is open-source the future of OSS/BSS?" Hence the title of…
Read More »I've just had a really interesting first day at TM Forum's Digital Transformation Asia (https://dta.tmforum.org and #tmfdigitalasia ). The quality of presentations was quite high. Some great thought-provoking ideas!! Nik Willetts kicked off his keynote with the following quote, which I'm paraphrasing, "Telcos need to start capturing value, not just creating it as they have for the last decade." For me, this is THE key takeaway…
Read More »"You are so much more likely to put effort into something when you know whether it will pay off and what the gains will be. Not knowing how things will turn out undermines your motivation and makes you delay taking action." Dr Theo Tsaousides in his book, Brainblocks. Have you seen the reality TV show, "The Biggest Loser?" I rarely watch TV, but have noticed that…
Read More »"Data mass is beginning to exhibit gravitational properties – it’s getting heavy – and eventually it will be too big to move." Guy Lupo in this article on TM Forum's Inform that also includes contributions from George Glass and Dawn Bushaus. Really interesting concept, and article, linked above. The touchpoint explosion is helping to make our data sets ever bigger... and heavier. In my earlier days…
Read More »I wonder if we're reaching the point where "telecommunication services" is no longer a relevant term? By association, SLAs are also a bust. But what are they replaced by? A telecommunication service used to effectively be the allocation of a carrier's resources for use by a specific customer. Now? Well, less so Service consumption channel alternatives are increasing, from TV and radio; to PC, to mobile,…
Read More »DTA - TM Forum's Digital Transformation Asia event (https://dta.tmforum.org/) is almost upon us already. Held in Kuala Lumpur from 13-15 November, there are some really interesting looking talks on the agenda (https://dta.tmforum.org/agenda). I'm looking forward to being overwhelmed by the collective genius that is sure to be in attendance. Will you be making an appearance?
Read More »You've probably all heard of Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule from his book, Outliers? In it he suggests that roughly 10,000 hours of deliberate practice makes an individual world-class in their field. But is 10,000 hours enough in the field of OSS? I look back to the year 2000, when I first started on OSS projects. Over the following 5 years or so, I averaged an…
Read More »In OSS there are some tasks that require availability (the green button on communicator). The Network Operations Centre (NOC) is one. But does it require on-site presence in the NOC? An earlier post showed how wrong I was about collaboration rooms. It seems that ticket flicking (and perhaps communication tools like slack) is the preferred model. If this is the preferred model, then perhaps there is…
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