Just a quick word of warning. This blog starts off away from OSS, but please persevere. It ends up back with a couple of key OSS learnings. Long ago in the technology consulting game, I came to an important realisation. When arriving on a fresh new client site, chances are that many of the "easy technical solutions" that pop into my head to solve the client's…
Read More »"I will never understand why Advertising is an investment and customer service is a cost. Let's spend millions trying to reach people, but if they try to reach us, make our contact details impossible to find, incentivise call center workers to hang up as fast as possible or ideally outsource it to a bot. It's absolute lunacy and it absolutely matters." Tom Goodwin here. Couldn't agree…
Read More »When your ideas get stolen. A few meditations from Seth Godin: "Good for you. Isn't it better that your ideas are worth stealing? What would happen if you worked all that time, created that book or that movie or that concept and no one wanted to riff on it, expand it or run with it? Would that be better? You're not going to run out of…
Read More »Nokia selected by China Mobile to build advanced public/private cloud services infrastructure using Nuage Networks VSP. Nokia's Nuage Networks has been chosen by China Mobile (Suzhou) Software Technical Company, a wholly-owned subsidiary of China Mobile, as the SDN platform for China Mobile's public and private enterprise cloud services offering. The platform is based on the Nuage Networks VSP and includes cloud implementations on virtual machines, Kubernetes…
Read More »"Brand, marketing, pricing and sales were seen as sexy. Networks and IT were the geeks no one seemed to speak to or care about. … This isolation and excommunication of our technical team had created an environment of disillusion. If you wanted something done the answer was mostly ‘No – we have no budget and no time for that’. Our marketing team knew more about loyalty…
Read More »The Linux Foundation Hosts ‘DANOS’ Project, a Unified Network Operating System. The Linux Foundation announced the Disaggregated Network Operating System (DANOS) project to enable community collaboration across network hardware, forwarding and operating system layers. DANOS is initially based on AT&T’s “dNOS” software framework of an open, cost-effective and flexible alternative to traditional networking operating systems. As part of The Linux Foundation, it will incorporate contributions from complementary…
Read More »Amdocs collaborates with Microsoft to enable ONAP on Microsoft Azure. Amdocs announced its implementation of Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. This new development enables operators to deliver virtual network services running on Azure, orchestrated and managed using ONAP. Amdocs and Microsoft will show how operators can gain the time-to-market and cost benefits of public clouds with a demonstration of ONAP…
Read More »Hands up if you're old enough to remember ATM here? And I don't mean the type of ATM that sits on the side of a building dispensing cash - no I mean Asynchronous Transfer Mode. For those who aren't familiar with ATM, a little background. ATM was THE telco-grade packet-switching technology of choice for most carriers globally around the turn of the century. Who knows, there…
Read More »Our most recent two posts, from yesterday and Friday, have talked about one stunningly simple idea that helps to overcome one of OSS' biggest challenges - data quality. Those posts have stimulated quite a bit of dialogue and it seems there is some consensus about the cleverness of the idea. I don't know if the idea will change the OSS landscape (hopefully), or just continue to…
Read More »Last Friday's blog discussed how I’ve just been blown away by the most elegant OSS innovation I’ve seen in decades. You can read more detail via the link, but the three major factors in this simple, elegant solution to data quality problems (probably OSS' biggest kryptonite) are: Being able to make connections that break standard object hierarchy rules; but Having the ability to mark that standard…
Read More »Looking back, I now consider myself extremely lucky to have worked with an amazing product on the first OSS project I worked on (all the way back in 2000). And I say amazing because the underlying data models and core product architecture are still better than any other I've worked with in the two decades since. The core is the most elegant, simple and powerful I've…
Read More »Further to yesterday's post that posed the question about whether your data was AI ready for virtualised network assurance use cases, I thought I'd raise a few more notes. The two reasons posed were: Our data sets haven't had time to collect much elastic / dynamic network data yet Our data is riddled with human-generated data that is error-prone On the latter case in particular, I…
Read More »"In the virtualization domain, the old root cause technology is becoming obsolete because resources and workloads move around dynamically – we no longer have fixed network and compute resources. Existing service assurance systems in the telecommunication network were designed to manage a fixed set of resources and these assurance systems fall short in monitoring dynamic virtualized networks. Code was written using a rule based approach on…
Read More »It's only recently dawned on me that TM Forum Live! has a new website and a new name. It's now called Digital Transformation World. Time has flown. It's already less than two months until the event (14-16 May 2018 in Nice, France). Catalyst day is on the 17th. Registrations can already be made... at this link: https://dtw.tmforum.org/registration/. Check out the list of speakers. There are some…
Read More »"Most people know what they want, but don’t know how to get it. When you don’t know the next step, you procrastinate or feel lost. But a little research can turn a vague desire into specific actions. For example: When musicians say, “I need a booking agent”, I ask, “Which one? What’s their name?” You can’t act on a vague desire. But with an hour of…
Read More »Something has always bothered me about the medical profession. Whenever you visit a GP (General Practitioner), unless you need to come back for test results or ongoing treatment, the doctor never finds out if their diagnoses / prescriptions have been effective. In my experience at least, they don't call to see whether there were any complications, allergic reactions to treatments, improvement in condition, etc and only…
Read More »The latest Magic Quadrant for Operations Support Systems is as follows: Source: Gartner (February 2018)
Read More »Fortumo partners with Apigate to launch content services in Cambodia. Fortumo and Apigate, a subsidiary of Axiata Digital, announced their latest collaboration to launch content services in Cambodia via Smart Axiata’s Direct Carrier Billing API. This collaboration will enable Smart’s subscribers to make payments in app stores for digital content and games by conveniently charging the payments to their mobile phone bill. Almost half of Cambodians…
Read More »PCCW Global and Colt demonstrate speedy payment settlements using blockchain technology. PCCW Global, the international operating division of HKT, Hong Kong’s premier telecommunications service provider, and Colt Technology Services have collaborated with Clear, a blockchain start-up company, to demonstrate that inter-carrier settlement times can be reduced from hours to minutes by blockchain technology. The objective of this Proof of Concept (PoC) was to ascertain if the…
Read More »How many times have you heard a colleague say they wish they could clone themselves (or one of their trusted colleagues)? Alternatively, to say they'd like to do a copy *.* of a colleague's brain? I'm feeling that way more now than at any time in the past, not of any one person in particular, but on whole fields of expertise. Data science, network virtualisation, cloud…
Read More »We introduced the concept of The Trickle-down Effect last year, an effect that sees the most minor changes trickling down through an OSS stack, with much bigger consequences than expected. "The trickle-down effect can be insidious, turning a nice open COTS solution into a beast that needs constant attention to cope with the most minor of operational changes. The more customisations made, the more gnarly the…
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