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Networks lead. OSS are an afterthought. Time for a change?

In a recent post, we described how changing conditions in networks (eg topologies, technologies, etc) cause us to reconsider our OSS. Networks always lead and OSS (or any form of network management including EMS/NMS) is always an afterthought. Often a distant afterthought. But what if we spun this around? What if OSS initiated change in our networks / services? After all, OSS is the platform that…

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17/04/2018 No Comments

A purple cow in our OSS paddock

A few years ago, I read a book that had a big impact on the way I thought about OSS and OSS product development. Funnily enough, the book had nothing to do with OSS or product development. It was a book about marketing - a subject that I wasn't very familiar with at the time, but am now fascinated with. And the book? Purple Cow by…

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16/04/2018 No Comments

Orange Luxembourg contracts Comarch

Orange Luxembourg contracts Comarch for complete BSS overhaul. Comarch, announced that Orange Luxembourg selected Comarch BSS products to improve billing and customer management processes. The solution covers Orange mobile prepaid and postpaid services (voice and data), the “Orange Love” offer (internet, TV, VoIP, and mobile) as well as cloud and third party services in Luxembourg. These will be offered, charged, billed and managed using an array…

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13/04/2018 No Comments

Designing OSS to cope with greater transience (part 2)

This is the second episode discussing the significant change to OSS thinking caused by modern network models. Yesterday's post discussed how there has been a paradigm shift from static networks (think PDH) to dynamic / transient networks (think SDN/NFV) and that OSS are faced with a similar paradigm shift in how they manage modern network models. We can either come up with adaptive / algorithmic mechanisms…

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13/04/2018 No Comments

Designing OSS to cope with greater transience

"There are three broad models of networking in use today. The first is the adaptive model where devices exchange peer information to discover routes and destinations. This is how IP networks, including the Internet, work. The second is the static model where destinations and pathways (routes) are explicitly defined in a tabular way, and the final is the central model where destinations and routes are centrally…

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12/04/2018 No Comments

Which OSS tool model do you prefer – Abstract or Specific?

There's something I've noticed about OSS products - they are either designed to be abstract / flexible or they are designed to cater for specific technologies / topologies. When designed from the abstract perspective, the tools are built around generic core data models. For example, whether a virtual / logical device, a physical device, a customer premises device, a core network device, an access network device,…

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11/04/2018 No Comments

An OSS conundrum with many perspectives

"Even aside from the OSS impact, it illustrates the contrast between "bottom-up" planning of networks (new card X is cheaper/has more ports) and "top down" (what do we need to change to reduce our costs/increase capacity)." Robert Curran. Robert's quote above is in response to a post called "Trickle-down impact planning." Robert makes a really interesting point. Adding a new card type is a relatively common…

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10/04/2018 No Comments

An embarrassing experience on an overseas OSS project

The video below has been doing the rounds on LinkedIn lately. What is your key takeaway from the video? Most would say the perfection, but for me, the perfection was a result of the hand-offs, which were almost immediate and precise, putting team-mates into better position. The final shot didn't need the brilliance of a Messi or Ronaldo to put the ball into the net. Whilst…

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09/04/2018 No Comments

Etisalat Selects NEC / Netcracker

Etisalat Selects NEC and Netcracker as Prime Integrator for its NFV Infrastructure Platform to Advance its Telecom Cloud Program. NEC Corporation and Netcracker Technology announced that Etisalat has selected NEC/Netcracker as the prime solution provider for its multivendor telecom cloud program. NEC/Netcracker will provide systems integration services, operational tools, NFV orchestration and full automation in a DevOps mode to "cloudify" its network. As the prime integrator,…

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07/04/2018 No Comments

Designing an OSS from NFRs backwards

When we're preparing a design (or capturing requirements) for a new or updated OSS, I suspect most of us design with functional requirements (FRs) in mind. That is, our first line of thinking is on the shiny new features or system behaviours we have to implement. But what if we were to flip this completely? What if we were to design against Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) instead?…

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06/04/2018 No Comments

Assuming the other person can’t come up with the answer

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…

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05/04/2018 No Comments

I will never understand…

"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…

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04/04/2018 No Comments

When your ideas get stolen

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…

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03/04/2018 4 Comments

Nokia / Nuage selected by China Mobile

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…

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30/03/2018 No Comments

Re-writing the Sales vs Networks cultural divide

"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…

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29/03/2018 No Comments

DANOS a Unified Network Operating System

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…

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29/03/2018 No Comments

Amdocs and Microsoft enable ONAP on Azure

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…

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28/03/2018 No Comments

Does the death of ATM bear comparison with telco-grade open-source OSS?

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…

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28/03/2018 No Comments

Blown away by one innovation. Now to extend on it

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…

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27/03/2018 No Comments

Blown away by one innovation – a follow-up concept

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…

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26/03/2018 No Comments