You're probably familiar with strangler figs, which grow on a host tree, often resulting in the eventual death of the host. You're probably less familiar with the strangler fig analogy as an OSS transformation or cutover model. The concept is that there is a "host tree" (ie legacy system) that needs to be obsoleted and replaced, but it's so dominant and integral (eg because of complex…
Read More »What if the objectives of every large OSS project were actually perceived as a stretch goal by internal and external stakeholders of the project? Sim Sitkin, et al describe a stretch goal as, "We’re not talking about merely challenging goals. We’re talking about management moon shots—goals that appear unattainable given current practices, skills, and knowledge." Dymphna Boholt describes it thus: "The reality is that if everything…
Read More »"The myth is that people play games because they want to avoid challenging work. The reality is, people play games to engage in well-designed, challenging work. The only thing they are avoiding is poorly designed work. In essence, we are replacing poorly designed work with work that provides a more meaningful challenge and offers a richer sense of progress. And we should note at this point…
Read More »First ZTE was banned, then given a lifeline by President Trump, but then Trump has also been rebuked. "The House Appropriations Committee unanimously accepted an amendment to an appropriations bill on Thursday that reinforces sanctions against Chinese telecommunications company ZTE, a rebuke to President Trump, who earlier this week tweeted support for the company." reported TheHill.com.
Read More »AT&T Working With SKT and Intel to Launch a New Open Infrastructure Project, Airship. As part of our ongoing commitment to open and collaborative innovation, we’re working with SKT, Intel Corporation and the OpenStack Foundation to launch a new open infrastructure project called Airship. This project builds on the foundation laid by the OpenStack-Helm project launched in 2017. It lets cloud operators manage sites at every stage from…
Read More »Oracle Buys DataScience.com. Oracle announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire DataScience.com, whose platform centralizes data science tools, projects and infrastructure in a fully-governed workspace. Data science teams use the platform to organize work, easily access data and computing resources, and execute end-to-end model development workflows. Leading organizations like Amgen, Rio Tinto, and Sonos are using the DataScience.com platform to improve productivity, reduce operational…
Read More »DGIT Systems acquires billing systems vendor Inomial. DGIT Systems announced the acquisition of Inomial Pty Ltd. Inomial Pty Ltd is a Billing Systems Vendor with a strong customer base predominantly located in the Asia Pacific region. “Inomial’s suite of billing related products complement DGITs award winning Telflow Service Delivery Platform”, Greg Tilton CEO DGIT Systems said today. “The acquisition of Inomial provides us with a significant…
Read More »As promised in yesterday's post about lumpy revenues for OSS product companies, today we’ll discuss OSS professional services revenues and the contrasting mindset compared with products. Professional services revenues are a great way of smoothing out the lumpy revenue streams of traditional OSS product companies. There's just one problem though. Of all the vendors I've worked with, I've found that they always have a predilection -…
Read More »HPE to Acquire Plexxi. Ric Lewis of HPE writes in his blog... "Our customers live in a hybrid world, running a mix of workloads on traditional IT, as well as private, managed and public clouds. They need to be able to move at cloud-like speed, regardless of where the data lives. HPE is focused on delivering a portfolio of products and services that simplify hybrid IT,…
Read More »Verizon is migrating over 1,000 business-critical applications and database backend systems to AWS. Courtesy of Businesswire. Amazon Web Services announced that Verizon Communications has selected AWS as its preferred public cloud provider. Verizon is migrating over 1,000 business-critical applications and database backend systems to AWS, several of which also include the migration of production databases to Amazon Aurora—AWS’s relational database engine that combines the speed and…
Read More »Being an OSS product supplier to telecom operators is a tough business. There is a constant stream of outgoings on developer costs, cost of sale, general overheads, etc. Unfortunately revenue streams are rarely so smooth. In fact, they tend to be decidedly lumpy - unpredictable (in terms of timelines when forecasting inflows years in advance) but large spikes of income stemming from customer implementations. Not only…
Read More »"Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems.” Rene Descartes. On a recent project, I spent quite a lot of time thinking in terms of problem statements, then mapping them into solutions that could be broken down for assignment to lots of delivery teams - feeding their Agile backlogs. On that assignment, like the multitude of OSS projects in…
Read More »I recently had something of a perspective-flip moment in relation to automation within the realm of OSS. In the past, I've tended to tackle the automation challenge from the perspective of applying automated / scripted responses to tasks that are done manually via the OSS. But it's dawned on me that I have it around the wrong way! It is an incremental perspective on the main…
Read More »News last week of ZTE ceasing major operations due to US embargoes have taken another turn. President Trump has now tweeted,"President Xi of China, and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast. Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!" What will be the next twist in…
Read More »Sigma Systems Supports Telkomsel in Building a Digital Indonesia. Sigma Systems, announced a major deal with Indonesia’s leading mobile network operator, Telkomsel. With more than 190 million customers, Telkomsel is currently the largest mobile operator in Indonesia. Telkomsel has consistently implemented the latest mobile technology and was the first to commercially launch 4G LTE mobile services in the country. Entering the digital era, Telkomsel continues to…
Read More »Amdocs to provide KCOM with a service delivery platform offering capabilities for next generation networks including flexible bandwidth, time-bound bandwidth and SD-WAN services. Amdocs announced that KCOM, a leading provider of communications, applications and integration services to the UK enterprise and consumer market, has selected an Amdocs service delivery platform to enhance its new next generation network infrastructure. Amdocs will provide a new orchestration platform that…
Read More »Vivo Expands Netcracker's Service Management as Part of Large-Scale Digital Transformation. Netcracker Technology announced that Vivo, Telefónica Group’s Brazilian subsidiary, has upgraded and expanded its use of Netcracker’s Service Management solution. The solution will help Vivo standardize provisioning and activation for all B2B and B2C mobile services. Vivo is the leading communications service provider in Brazil, delivering fixed-line and mobile voice, television and internet broadband services…
Read More »As a result of an export denial order by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), ZTE has opted to cease all major operating activities and trading of shares on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The ban on ZTE comes as a result of selling products to Iran. It prevents ZTE from purchasing components (eg semiconductors), software (eg licensed components of Android…
Read More »This is the third in a series describing the process of finding the right OSS solution for your specific needs and getting estimated pricing to help you build a business case. The first post described the overall OSS selection process we use. The second described the way we poll the market and prepare a short-list of OSS products / vendors based on current capabilities. Once you've…
Read More »Telefónica Spain transforms its data centers with Nokia high-performance routing and Nuage Networks Virtualized Cloud Services. Nokia and its venture focused on software-defined networking (SDN), Nuage Networks, are partnering with Telefónica Spain to build an open, elastic and highly secure data center network infrastructure, dramatically expanding the agility, scale and efficiency of its cloud-based services. A key part of Telefónica's cloud vision is to offer enterprises…
Read More »In yesterday's post, we talked about how to estimate OSS pricing. One of the key pillars of the approach was to first identify a short-list of vendors / integrators best-suited to implementing your specific OSS, then working closely with them to construct a pricing model. Finding the right vendor / integrator can be a complex challenge. There are dozens, if not hundreds of OSS / BSS…
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