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Vodafone selects NEC/Netcracker for Domain Orchestration

Vodafone Will Leverage NEC/Netcracker's Hybrid Operations Management to Drive Groupwide Cloud Transformation. NEC Corporation and Netcracker Technology announced that Vodafone Group has selected NEC/Netcracker's Hybrid Operations Management (HOM) solution to support its transition into a telecommunications cloud provider. The virtualization initiative will incorporate the use of cloud-native, SDN and NFV technologies to evolve operational and business systems and processes. NEC/Netcracker's Hybrid Operations Management will support this…

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28/02/2018 No Comments

Aria Networks joins ETSI Network AI Initiative

AI (Artificial Intelligence) and networking pioneer Aria Networks has joined the ETSI group formed to lead the industry in mapping the future of AI and Networking. The ETSI Experiential Networked Intelligence (ENI) Industry Specification Group (ISG) was set up in February 2017, to define a new architecture for network management leveraging Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to improve automation. ETSI ENI already has the backing of…

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28/02/2018 No Comments

Fast / Slow OSS processes

Yesterday's post discussed using smart contracts and Network as a Service (NaaS) to give a network the properties that will allow it to self-heal. It mentioned a couple of key challenges, one being that there will always be physical activities such as cable cuts fixes, faulty equipment replacement, physical equipment expansion / contraction / lifecycle-management. In a TM Forum presentation last week, Sylvain Denis of Orange…

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28/02/2018 No Comments

Amdocs and Amazon Web Services announce strategic program

Amdocs and Amazon Web Services Announce Strategic Program. Amdocs announced a strategic collaboration agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accelerate Communications Service Providers’ (CSPs) transition to the cloud to drive rapid innovation and operational efficiencies. A recent, comprehensive industry survey completed by Analysys Mason found that by 2022 more than 90 percent of CSP systems will run on the cloud, with more than 60 percent…

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28/02/2018 No Comments

The challenges in transforming network assurance to network healing

A couple of interesting concepts have the ability to fundamentally change the way networks and services are maintained. If they can be harnessed, we could replace the term "network assurance" with "network healing." The first concept is SON, which has been formulated specifically with mobile radio networks in mind, but has the potential to extend into all network types. "A Self-Organizing Network (SON) is an automation…

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27/02/2018 No Comments

Potential OSS failures aren’t always technical

I recently attended an event where a brainstorming question was posed about how a particular next-gen OSS concept might fail. Interesting exercise! There were a lot of super-clever technical people in the room. The brainstorming of ideas was a fascinating one. We dived deeply into the experiences of many of the technical people in the room and all the potential technical reasons for failure. But I…

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26/02/2018 No Comments

NEC and Netcracker advance commercial NaaS deployment at TELUS

Netcracker-Enabled Network Transformation Powers TELUS to Deliver Personalized, Software-Defined Networking Services Faster. NEC Corporation and Netcracker Technology announced that NEC/Netcracker's Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) Business and Operational Support solution has gone into production at TELUS, a Canadian telecommunications company. TELUS NaaS enables businesses to virtually build, manage and cloud-optimize their networks quickly, easily and cost-effectively through a flexible self-serve platform. New secure networking services, such as SD-WAN, can…

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24/02/2018 No Comments

Etisalat chooses Nokia’s Nuage Networks SD-WAN

Etisalat chooses Nokia's Nuage Networks SD-WAN solution as part of its 'Sahaab Program' to cloudify network services. Nokia announced that Etisalat has chosen the Nuage Networks Virtualized Network Services (VNS) SD-WAN solution as a key element in its cloud transformation program. Nuage Networks VNS enables Etisalat to provide automated, dynamic, programmable and more efficient services to its enterprise customers. It will enable self-service ordering and configuration…

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24/02/2018 No Comments

Compiling “The Zen of OSS” perhaps?

A recent presentation just reminded me of "The Zen of Python." It's a collection of 20 (19?) software principles, particularly as they relate to the Python programming language. Since OSS is software-defined, (almost) all of the principles (not sure about the "Dutch" one) relate to OSS in a programming sense, but perhaps in a broader sense as well. I'd like to share two pairings: Errors should…

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23/02/2018 No Comments

This one OSS factor can give a sustainable advantage

The business case justifications of OSS tend to fall into four categories: Revenue increase - the operationalisation and monetisation of an operator's assets Cost reduction - improving the operational efficiency of the operator Insight generation - by leveraging the valuable data that an OSS collects Brand value - this is a catch-all for many different ways an OSS can contribute to (or detract from) an operator's…

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22/02/2018 No Comments

Dan Pink’s 6 critical OSS senses

I recently wrote an article that spoke about the obsolescence of jobs in OSS, particularly as a result of Artificial Intelligence. But an article by someone much more knowledgeable about AI than me, Rodney Brooks, had this to say, "We are surrounded by hysteria about the future of artificial intelligence and robotics — hysteria about how powerful they will become, how quickly, and what they will…

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21/02/2018 No Comments

Finding the most important problems to solve

The problem with OSS is that there are too many problems. We don't have to look too hard to find a problem that needs solving. An inter-related issue is that we're (almost always) constrained by resources and aren't able to solve every problem we find. I have a theory - As much as you are skilled at solving OSS problems, it's actually your skill at deciding…

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20/02/2018 No Comments

NTT Com India-Netmagic partners with Nuage Networks

NTT Com India-Netmagic partners with Nuage Networks to provide Managed SD-WAN Service. NTT Com India-Netmagic announced that the company has partnered with Nuage Networks, the Nokia venture focused on Software Defined Networks (SDN), to enhance its Network as a Service (NaaS) portfolio based on its innovative Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) solution. This enables enterprises to automatically route and optimise network traffic and gain visibility of…

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20/02/2018 No Comments

OSS and Network of the Future architectures workshop in Melbourne this week

OSS and Network of the Future architectures workshop in Melbourne this week. Click on the link above to register online. TM Forum's description of the event is as follows: As part of the TM Forum Open Digital Architecture program, we are starting work on a standardized definition of Operational Domain Managers (ODM) capabilities. Telstra will be hosting an open TM Forum Local workshop on ODM to…

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19/02/2018 No Comments

Bringing Eminem’s blank canvas to OSS

"When you start out in your career, you have a blank canvas, so you can paint anywhere that you want because the shit ain't been painted on yet. And then your second album comes out, and you paint a little more and you paint a little more. By the time you get to your seventh and eighth album you've already painted all over it. There's nowhere…

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19/02/2018 No Comments

Nokia and Tele2 sign strategic IoT partnership

Nokia and Tele2 sign strategic partnership to provide global IoT services. Nokia and Tele2 IoT have signed a five-year agreement to enable the delivery of IoT services to Tele2 enterprise customers based on Nokia's worldwide IoT network grid (WING). Nokia WING will allow Tele2 IoT to rapidly and cost-effectively provide complete IoT services to its enterprise customers in fields including transport, healthcare, smart city and utilities…

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19/02/2018 No Comments

50 exercises to ignite your OSS innovation sessions

Every project starts with an idea... an idea that someone is excited enough to sponsor. But where are your ideas being generated from? How do they get cultivated and given time to grow? How do they get pitched? and How do they get heard? How are sponsors persuaded? How do they then get implemented? How do we amplify this cycle of innovation and implementation? I'm fascinated by…

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16/02/2018 No Comments

How the investment strategy of a $106 billion VC fund changed my OSS thinking

What is a service provider's greatest asset? Now I'm biased when considering the title question, but I believe OSS are the puppet-master of every modern service provider. They're the systems that pull all of the strings of the organisation. They generate the revenue by operationalising and assuring the networks as well as the services they carry. They coordinate the workforce. They form the real-time sensor networks…

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15/02/2018 No Comments

The chains of integration are too light until…

"Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken." Warren Buffett (although he attributed it to an unknown author, perhaps originating with Samuel Johnson). What if I were to replace the word "habit" in the quote above with "OSS integration" or "OSS customisation" or "feature releases?" The elegant quote reflects this image: The chains of feature releases are…

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14/02/2018 No Comments

Updated OSS products / vendors list

Over the last few days we've made some updates to our OSS products / vendors list to reflect recent acquisitions, mergers, etc. Please let us know if there are any others we should be adding to the list.

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13/02/2018 No Comments

Posing a Network Data Synchronisation Protocol (NDSP) concept

Data quality is one of the biggest challenges we face in OSS. A product could be technically perfect, but if the data being pumped into it is poor, then the user experience of the product will be awful - the OSS becomes unusable, and that in itself generates a data quality death spiral. This becomes even more important for the autonomous, self-healing, programmable, cooperative networks being…

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13/02/2018 No Comments