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Where are the reliability hotspots in your OSS?

As you already know, there are two categories of downtime - unplanned (eg failures) and planned (eg upgrades / maintenance). Planned downtime sounds a lot nicer (for operators) but the reality is that you could call both types "incidents" - they both impact (or potentially impact) the customer. We sometimes underestimate that fact. Today's question is whether you're able to identify where the hotspots are in…

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17/09/2018 No Comments

Stop looking for exciting new features for your OSS

"The iPhone disrupted the handset business, but has not disrupted the cellular network operators at all, though many people were convinced that it would. For all that’s changed, the same companies still have the same business model and the same customers that they did in 2006. Online flight booking doesn’t disrupt airlines much, but it was hugely disruptive to travel agents. Online booking (for the sake…

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14/09/2018 No Comments

Chasing the big OSS waves

The diagram below attempts to show how the entire market (whether that's the supplier-side or the buyer-side) will absorb a given new feature. The leaders pick up the concept at T0 and then it takes another few years before the laggards implement it. Most of us in the OSS implementation world crave to be at the leading edge of change. The right-side of the curve is…

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13/09/2018 No Comments

Persona mapping for OSS PoCs

When selecting new applications for an OSS or to augment an existing OSS, it always makes sense to me to run a Proof of Concept. But what do we want to demonstrate in that PoC? For me, we want to run demonstrations of the factors (eg features, use-cases, processes, etc) that justify the investment. A simple exercise you can use is to identify the personas /…

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12/09/2018 No Comments

OSS operationalisation at scale

We had a highly flexible network design team at a previous company. Not because we wanted to necessarily, but because we were forced to by the client's allocation of work. Our team was largely based on casual workers because there was little to predict whether we needed 2 designers or 50 in any given week. The workload being assigned by the client was incredibly lumpy. But…

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11/09/2018 No Comments

Shifting a problem to the left using OSS

Interesting table below in relation to the customer satisfaction and costs of delivering various styles of customer assurance activities: Proactive Fix Self-help L1/2/3 Assurance Field Operations Customer Satisfaction Very High High Medium Low Expense Low Medium High Very High The ambition for any organisation is to perform a shift to the left on this table. In other words, to introduce assurance mechanisms that increase the likelihood…

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10/09/2018 No Comments

Ciena to acquire DonRiver

Ciena announces intent to acquire DonRiver. Ciena Corporation has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held DonRiver, a global software and services company specializing in federated network and service inventory management solutions within the service provider Operational Support Systems (OSS) environment. DonRiver will bring new capabilities to Ciena’s Blue Planet software and services portfolio that significantly enhance the company’s ability to deliver on its Adaptive…

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07/09/2018 No Comments

OSS data Ponzi scheme

"The more data you have, the more data you need to understand the data you have. You are engaged in a data ponzi scheme...Could it be in service assurance and IT ops that more data equals less understanding?" Phil Tee in the opening address at the AIOps Symposium. Interesting viewpoint right? Given that our OSS hold shed-loads of data, Phil is saying we need lots of…

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07/09/2018 No Comments

LG U+ (Korea) signs with Comarch

Comarch to Help Korean LG U+ to Launch One of the First 5G Networks Worldwide. Comarch and LG U+ have signed a major contract in a bid to completely revamp the Korean operator’s network resource and service management, covering Operations Support & Readiness, Fulfilment and Assurance domains, in preparation for the operator’s planned big scale 5G rollout. The upcoming implementation will allow LG U+ to migrate…

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05/09/2018 No Comments

Ericsson to acquire CENX

Ericsson to acquire CENX to boost network automation capability. Ericsson has agreed to acquire 100 percent of the shares in CENX, boosting Ericsson’s Operations Support Systems (OSS) portfolio with vendor-agnostic service assurance and closed-loop automation capability. Ericsson has held a minority stake in CENX since 2012. Ericsson has a market leading position in NFV and orchestration. This capability will be further enhanced with CENX’s closed-loop automation…

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05/09/2018 No Comments

Help needed: IoT / OSS cross-over use cases

Hi PAOSS community. I'd like to call in a favour today if I may. I'm on the hunt for any existing use-cases and / or project sites that have integrated a significant sensor network into their OSS and existing operational processes. I'm trying to better understand the opportunities at the cross-over point of use-cases / functionality / products / data / process between IoT platforms and…

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05/09/2018 No Comments

If your partners don’t have to talk to you then you win

"If your partners don't have to talk to you then you win." Guy Lupo. Put another way, the best form of customer service is no customer service (ie your customers and/or partners are so delighted with your automated offerings that they have no reason to contact you). They don't want to contact you anyway (generally speaking). They just want to consume a perfectly functional and reliable…

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04/09/2018 No Comments

What OSS environments do you need?

When we're planning a new OSS, we tend to be focused on the production (PROD) environment. After all, that's where it's primary purpose is served, to operationalise a network asset. That is where the majority of an OSS's value gets created. But we also need some (roughly) equivalent environments for separate purposes. We'll describe some of those environments below. By default, vendors will tend to only…

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31/08/2018 No Comments

The OSS self-driving vehicle

I was lucky enough to get some time of a friend recently, a friend who's running a machine-learning network assurance proof-of-concept (PoC). He's been really impressed with the results coming out of the PoC. However, one of the really interesting factors he's been finding is how frequently BAU (business as usual) changes in the OSS data (eg changes in naming conventions, topologies, etc) would impact results.…

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30/08/2018 4 Comments

Your OSS Justice League

Is it just me or has there been a proliferation of superhero movies coming out at cinemas lately? Not only that, but movies where teams of superheros link up to defeat the baddies (eg Deadpool 2, Justice League, etc)? The thing that strikes me as interesting is that there's rarely an overlap of super-powers within the team. They all have their different strengths and points of…

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29/08/2018 No Comments

Designing an Operational Domain Manager (ODM)

A couple of weeks ago, Telstra and the TM Forum held an event in Melbourne on OSS for next gen architectures. The diagram below comes from a presentation by Corey Clinger. It describes Telstra's Operational Domain Manager (ODM) model that is a key component of their Network as a Service (NaaS) framework. Notice the API stubs across the top of the ODM? Corey went on to…

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27/08/2018 No Comments

An alternate way of slicing OSS (part 2)

Last week we talked about an alternate way of slicing OSS projects. Today, we'll look a little deeper and include some diagrams. The traditional (aka waterfall) approach to delivering an OSS project sees one big-bang delivery of business value at the end of the implementation. Many vendors still aim to deliver this way. The yellow arrows indicate the sequential nature of this style of delivery. The…

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24/08/2018 No Comments

The OSS Ferrari analogy

A friend and colleague has recently been talking about a Ferrari analogy on a security project we've been contributing to. The end customers have decided they want a Ferrari solution, a shiny new, super-specified new toy (or in this case toys!). There's just one problem though. The customer has a general understanding of what it is to drive, but doesn't have driving experience or a driver's…

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22/08/2018 No Comments

Optimisation Support Systems

We've heard of OSS being an acronym for operational support systems, operations support systems, even open source software. I have a new one for you today - Optimisation Support Systems - that exists for no purpose other than to drive a mindset shift. "I think we have to transition from “expectations” in a hype sense to “expectations” in a goal sense. NFV is like any technology;…

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21/08/2018 No Comments

Security and privacy as an OSS afterthought?

I often talk about OSS being an afterthought for network teams. I find that they'll often design the network before thinking about how they'll operationalise it with an OSS solution. That's both in terms of network products (eg developing a new device and only thinking about building the EMS later), or building networks themselves. It can be a bit frustrating because we feel we can give…

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20/08/2018 No Comments

New OSS functionality or speed and scale?

We all know that revenue per bit (of data transferred across comms networks) is trending lower. How could we not? It's posited as one of the reasons for declining profitability of the industry. The challenge for telcos is how to engineer an environment of low revenue per bit but still be cost viable. I'm sure there are differentiated comms products out there in the global market.…

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17/08/2018 No Comments