Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

Market for orchestration to triple from 2018 to 2023… but…

"CSPs’ needs in orchestration are evolving in parallel on several dimensions. These can be considered hierarchically. At the highest level is software that has an end-to-end service role, as is the case in the ONAP project. This software generally supports a service life-cycle perspective, containing functions from design and service creation, to provisioning and activation, to operations management, analysis, upgrade and evolution. Beneath this tier, in…

06/07/2018 No Comments

3 categories of OSS investment justification

"Insurer IAG has modelled the financial cost that a data breach or ransomware attack would have on its business, in part to understand how much proposed infosec investments might offset its losses. Head of cybersecurity and governance Ian Cameron told IBM Think 2018 in Sydney that the “value-at-risk modelling” project called upon the company’s actuarial expertise to put numbers on different types and levels of security…

05/07/2018 No Comments

OSS stepping stone or wet cement

“Very often, what is meant to be a stepping stone turns out to be a slab of wet cement that will harden around your foot if you do not take the next step soon enough.” Richelle E. Goodrich. Not sure about your parts of the world, but I've noticed the terms "tactical" (ie stepping stone solution) and "strategic" (ie long-term solution) entering the architectural vernacular here…

03/07/2018 No Comments

OSS compromise, no, prioritise

On Friday, we talked about how making compromises on OSS can actually be a method for reducing risk. We used the OSS vendor selection process to discuss the point, where many stakeholders contribute to the list of requirements that help to select the best-fit product for the organisation. To continue with this same theme, I'd like to introduce you to a way of prioritising requirements that…

02/07/2018 No Comments

OSS compromise, not compromised

"When you've got multiple powerful parties involved in a decision, compromise is unavoidable. The point is not that compromise is a necessary evil. Rather, compromise can be valuable in itself, because it demonstrates that you've made use of diverse opinions, which is a way of limiting risk." Chip and Dan Heath in their book, Decisive. This risk perspective on compromise (ie diversity of thought), is a…

29/06/2018 No Comments

The OSS transformation dilemma

There's a particular carrier that I know quite well that appears to despise a particular OSS vendor... but keeps coming back to them... and keeps getting let down by them... but keeps coming back to them. And I'm not just talking about support of their existing OSS, but whole new tools. It never made sense to me... until reading Seth Godin's blog today. In it, he…

28/06/2018 No Comments

Are we making our OSS lives easier?

As an implementer of OSS, what's the single factor that makes it challenging for us to deliver on any of the three constraints of project delivery? Complexity. Or put another way, variants. The more variants, the less chance we have of delivering on time, cost or functionality. So let me ask you, is our next evolution simpler? No, actually. At least, it doesn't seem so to…

27/06/2018 No Comments

From PoC to OSS sandpit

You all know I'm a fan of training operators in OSS sandpits (and as apprenticeships during the build phase) rather than a week or two of classroom training at the end of a project. To reduce the re-work in building a sandpit environment, which will probably be a dev/test environment rather than a production environment, I like to go all the way back to the vendor…

26/06/2018 No Comments

Post Implementation Review (PIR)

Have you noticed that OSS projects need to go through extensive review to get funding of business cases? That makes sense. They tend to be a big investment after all. Many OSS projects fail, so we want to make sure this one doesn't and we perform thorough planing / due-diligence. But I do find it interesting that we spend less time and effort on Post Implementation…

25/06/2018 No Comments

OSS – just in time rather than just in case

We all know that once installed, OSS tend to stay in place for many years. Too much effort to air-lift in. Too much effort to air-lift back out, especially if tightly integrated over time. The monolithic COTS (off-the-shelf) tools of the past would generally be commissioned and customised during the initial implementation project, with occasional integrations thereafter. That meant we needed to plan out what functionality…

22/06/2018 No Comments

ONF executes new Strategic Plan

ONF Hits The Ground Running with Execution of New Strategic Plan. Providing an update to its previously announced strategic plan aimed at creating a robust supply chain for open source solutions for operators, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) today announced key milestones achieved. The achievements include the formation of the Technical Leadership Team (TLT), finalization on the initial focus areas for Reference Designs (RDs) and that four key new…

21/06/2018 No Comments

Would you ever alarm your lab equipment?

Something curious dawned on me the other day - I wondered how many people / organisations actively manage alarms / alerts being generated by their lab equipment? At first glance, this would seem silly. Lab environments are in constant flux, in all sorts of semi-configured situations, and therefore likely to be alarming their heads off at different times. As such, it would seem even sillier to…

21/06/2018 No Comments

An OSS doomsday scenario

If I start talking about doomsday scenarios where the global OSS job industry is decimated, most people will immediately jump to the conclusion that I'm predicting an artificial intelligence (AI) takeover. AI could have a role to play, but is not a key facet of the scenario I'm most worried about. You'd think that OSS would be quite a niche industry, but there must be thousands…

19/06/2018 No Comments

The OSS MoSCoW requirement prioritisation technique

Since the soccer World Cup is currently taking place in Russia, I thought I'd include reference to the MoSCoW technique in today's blog. It could be used as part of your vendor selection processes for the purpose of OSS requirement prioritisation. "The term MoSCoW itself is an acronym derived from the first letter of each of four prioritization categories (Must have, Should have, Could have, and…

18/06/2018 2 Comments

The OSS dart-board analogy

"The dartboard, by contrast, is not remotely logical, but is somehow brilliant. The 20 sector sits between the dismal scores of five and one. Most players aim for the triple-20, because that's what professionals do. However, for all but the best darts players, this is a mistake. If you are not very good at darts, your best opening approach is not to aim at triple-20 at…

15/06/2018 No Comments

Using OSS machine learning to predict backwards not forwards

There's a lot of excitement about what machine-led decisioning can introduce into the world of network operations, and rightly so. Excitement about predictions, automation, efficiency, optimisation, zero-touch assurance, etc. There are so many use-cases that disruptors are proposing to solve using Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and the like. I might have even been guilty of proposing a few ideas here on the PAOSS blog…

14/06/2018 2 Comments

The OSS farm equipment analogy

It's an interesting season as we come up to the EOFY (end of financial year - on 30 June). Budget cycles are coming to an end. At organisations that don't carry un-spent budgets into the next financial year, the looming EOFY triggers a use-it-or-lose-it mindset. In some cases, organisations are almost forced to allocate funds on OSS investments even if they haven't always had the time…

13/06/2018 No Comments

Did we forget the OSS operating model?

When we have a big OSS transformation to undertake, we tend to start with the use cases / requirements, work our way through the technical solution and build up an implementation plan before delivering it (yes, I've heavily reduced the real number of steps there!). However, we sometimes overlook the organisational change management part. That's the process of getting the customer's organisation aligned to assist with…

12/06/2018 4 Comments

Microsoft to acquire GitHub

Microsoft to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion. Microsoft Corp. announced it has reached an agreement to acquire GitHub, the world’s leading software development platform where more than 28 million developers learn, share and collaborate to create the future. Together, the two companies will empower developers to achieve more at every stage of the development lifecycle, accelerate enterprise use of GitHub, and bring Microsoft’s developer tools and…

06/06/2018 No Comments

1.045 Trillion reasons to re-consider your OSS strategy

"The global Internet of Things (IoT) market will be worth $1.1 trillion in revenue by 2025 as market value shifts from connectivity to platforms, applications and services. By that point, there will be more than 25 billion IoT connections (cellular and non-cellular), driven largely by growth in the industrial IoT market. The Asia Pacific region is forecast to become the largest global IoT region in terms…

06/06/2018 1 Comment

The paint the fence automation analogy

There are so many actions that could be automated by / with / in our OSS. It can be hard to know where to start can't it? One approach is to look at where the largest amounts of manual effort is being expended by operators. Another way is to employ the "paint the fence" analogy. When envisaging fulfilment workflows, it's easiest to picture actions that start…

05/06/2018 No Comments

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