Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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;…

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…

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.…

17/08/2018 No Comments

Expanding your bag of OSS tricks

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…

16/08/2018 2 Comments

An alternate way of slicing OSS projects

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:…

15/08/2018 No Comments

Telstra hosts “OSS & Networks for the Future architecture” tomorrow

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,…

13/08/2018 No Comments

Zero touch network & Service Management (ZSM)

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…

13/08/2018 No Comments

Celcom selects Huawei cloud OSS

Celcom Partners with Huawei to Apply a Cloud-Based Platform for Digitized Network Operations. Celcom Axiata Berhad inked an agreement with Huawei Technologies (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd. to apply the Cloud-based Digitized Operation Platform, Software as a Service (SaaS) solution. Celcom will be the first in the country to adopt a full suite cloud-based Operation Support Service (OSS) system to accelerate agility in their automation and the intelligence…

12/08/2018 No Comments

VMware to acquire Dell EMC Service Assurance Suite

VMware to Acquire Dell EMC Service Assurance Suite. VMware, Inc. announced a definitive agreement to acquire the technology and team of Dell EMC Service Assurance Suite - software spanning network health, performance monitoring and root cause analysis for communications service providers (CSPs) and their customers - from Dell EMC. The addition of the Dell EMC Service Assurance Suite technology to the VMware Telco NFV portfolio equips…

11/08/2018 No Comments

Just in time design

It's interesting how we tend to go in cycles. Back in the early days of OSS, the network operators tended to build their OSS from the ground up. Then we went through a phase of using Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) OSS software developed by third-party vendors. We now seem to be cycling back towards in-house development, but with collaboration that includes vendors and external assistance through open-source…

10/08/2018 2 Comments

Using risk reversal to design OSS

There's a concept in sales called "risk reversal" that takes all of the customers' likely issues with a product and provides answers to alleviate customer concerns. I believe we can apply the same concept to OSS, not just to sell them, but to design them. To borrow from a risk register page here on PAOSS, the major categories of risk that appear on almost all OSS projects…

09/08/2018 No Comments

Aggregated OSS buying models

Last week we discussed a sell-side co-op business model. Today we'll look at buy-side co-op models. In other industries, we hear of buying groups getting great deals through aggregated buying volumes. This is a little harder to achieve with products that are as uniquely customised as OSS. It's possible that OSS buy-side aggregation could occur for operators that are similar in nature but don't compete (eg…

08/08/2018 No Comments

An OSS data creation brain-fade

Many years ago, I made a data migration blunder that slowed a production OSS down to a crawl. Actually, less than a crawl. It almost became unusable. I was tasked with creating a production database of a carrier's entire network inventory, including data migration for a bunch of Nortel Passport ATM switches (yes, it was that long ago). There were around 70 of these devices in…

07/08/2018 No Comments

Network slicing, another OSS activity

"One business customer, for example, may require ultra-reliable services, whereas other business customers may need ultra-high-bandwidth communication or extremely low latency. The 5G network needs to be designed to be able to offer a different mix of capabilities to meet all these diverse requirements at the same time. From a functional point of view, the most logical approach is to build a set of dedicated networks…

03/08/2018 No Comments

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