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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »"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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »"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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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.…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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;…
Read More »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…
Read More »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.…
Read More »Let me ask you a question - when you've expanded your bag of tricks that help you to manage your OSS, where have they typically originated? By reading? By doing? By asking? Through mentoring? Via training courses? Relating to technical? People? Process? Product? Operations? Network? Hardware? Software? Design? Procure? Implement / delivery? Test? Deploy? By retrospective thinking? Creative thinking? Refinement thinking? Other? If you were to…
Read More »One of the biggest challenges of big bang OSS project implementations is that all of the business value (ie the OSS and its data, workflows, integrations, etc) gets delivered at once, normally at the end of a lengthy exercise. Ok, ok, so the delivery of value is not a challenge, it's the implications of a big delivery of value that's the challenge - implications that include:…
Read More »I'm looking forward to dropping in on a "OSS & Networks for the Future architecture" seminar being hosted by Telstra tomorrow. Hope to see you there. The agenda is as follows: 8:30 Welcome & registration | Johanne Mayer - Moderator (Global evangelist NaaS 2020, Telstra) 9:00 Introduction | Gary Traver (Director Media Product Engineering, Telstra) 9:15 TMF Open Digital Architecture Update |Ken Dilbeck (VP, Collaborative R&D,…
Read More »Zero touch network & Service Management (ZSM) is a next-gen network management approach using closed-loop principles hosted by ETSI. An ETSI blog has just demonstrated the first ZSM Proof of Concept (PoC). The slide deck describing the PoC, supplied by EnterpriseWeb, can be found here. The diagram below shows a conceptual closed-loop assurance architecture used within the PoC . It contains some similar concepts to a closed-loop…
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