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…
Read More »The left-hand panel of the triptych below shows the current state of interactions with most OSS. There are hundreds of variants inbound via external sources (ie multi-channel) and even internal sources (eg different service types). Similarly, there are dozens of networks (and downstream systems), each with different interface models. Each needs different formatting and integration costs escalate. The intent model of network provisioning standardises the network…
Read More »We all know of the tectonic shifts in the world of telco services, profitability and business models. One common trend is for telcos to offer pipes that are bigger and faster. Seems like a commoditising business model to me, but our OSS still need to support that. How? Through enabling efficiency at scale. Building tools, GUIs, workflows, integrations, sales pipelines, etc that enable telcos march seamlessly…
Read More »Any long-term readers of this blog will have heard me talk about tripods, and how valuable they are to any OSS team. They're the people who know about IT, operations/networks and the business context within which they're working. They're the most valuable people I've worked with in the world of OSS because they're the ones who can connect the many disparate parts that make up an…
Read More »IBM TO ACQUIRE RED HAT, COMPLETELY CHANGING THE CLOUD LANDSCAPE AND BECOMING WORLD’S #1 HYBRID CLOUD PROVIDER. IBM and Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source cloud software, announced today that the companies have reached a definitive agreement under which IBM will acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Red Hat for $190.00 per share in cash, representing a total enterprise…
Read More »Here at Passionate About OSS, we're passionate about making OSS happen. We have an extensive network of contacts. We just naturally tend to find ourselves making connections between the many experts in our network. Connecting those who are hoping to find an OSS expert with an OSS expert hoping to be found. We've just introduced a new free-of-charge OSS expert registry to help people find OSS…
Read More »"This is the logic that led Facebook inexorably to the ‘algorithmic feed’, which is really just tech jargon for saying that instead of this random (i.e. 'time-based') sample of what’s been posted, the platform tries to work out which people you would most like to see things from, and what kinds of things you would most like to see. It ought to be able to work…
Read More »A number of years ago I heard about an OSS product that introduced collaborative rooms for network operators to collectively solve challenging network health events. It was in line with some of my own thinking about the use of collaboration techniques to solve cross-domain or complex events. But the concept hasn't caught on in the way that I expected. I was curious why, so I asked…
Read More »Yesterday's post discussed Dave Duggal's concept of 20th century OSS being all about centralizing command and control to gain efficiency through vertical integration and mass standardization, whilst 21st century OSS are about decentralization – gaining efficiency through horizontal integration of partner ecosystems and mass customization. We talked about transitioning from a telco market driven by economies of scale (the 20th century benchmark) to a "market of…
Read More »"While the 20th century was all about centralizing command and control to gain efficiency through vertical integration and mass standardization, 21st century automation is about decentralization – gaining efficiency through horizontal integration of partner ecosystems and mass customization, as in the context-aware cloud where personalized experience across channels is dynamically orchestrated. The operational challenge of our time is to coordinate these moving parts into coherent and…
Read More »OSS Vendor 1. "I have 1 million features." (Dr Evil puts finger in mouth) OSS Vendor 2. "Yeah, well I have 1,000,001 features in my OSS." This is the arms-race that we see in OSS, just like almost any other tech product. I imagine that vendors get into this arms-race because they wish to differentiate. Better to differentiate on functionality than price. If there's a feature…
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