Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

A new, more sophisticated closed-loop OSS model

Back in early 2014, PAOSS posted an article about the importance of closed loop designs in OSS, which included the picture below: It generated quite a bit of discussion at the time and led me to being introduced to two companies that were separately doing some interesting aspects of this theoretical closed loop system. [Interestingly, whilst being global companies, they both had strong roots tying back…

11/09/2017 No Comments

Altice and Amdocs partner

Altice USA and amdocs enter into multi-year partnership to establish industry-leading Business and Operational Support Systems. Altice USA, one of the largest broadband communications and video service operators in the U.S. and the provider of Optimum and Suddenlink-branded internet, TV and phone services, and Amdocs announced that they have extended their partnership and entered into a multi-year agreement for key business and operational support systems. The…

09/09/2017 No Comments

Redknee raises Cdn$96 Million

Redknee Solutions Inc. Raises Cdn$96 Million. Redknee Solutions Inc. announced that it has closed its previously announced rights offering to holders of its subordinate voting shares (the "Rights Offering"). Under the Rights Offering, an aggregate of 108,519,936 subordinate voting shares were issued at a subscription price of Cdn$0.63 per share for gross proceeds to the Company of approximately Cdn$68 million. The net proceeds of the Rights…

08/09/2017 No Comments

From pipeline to platform

"Amazon established an architecture to leverage its assets for implementing a wide range of business models in a repeatable way for the retail industry. In most cases, Amazon is exposing product offerings it doesn’t actually own. It carries some inventory for third parties, but its main tasks now are vetting retail partners, ensuring product quality, giving partners access to the marketplace, and arranging payment and delivery…

08/09/2017 No Comments

An OSS knowledge plane for SDN

"We propose a new objective for network research: to build a fundamentally different sort of network that can assemble itself given high level instructions, reassemble itself as requirements change, automatically discover when something goes wrong, an automatically fix a detected problem or explain why it cannot do so. We further argue that to achieve this goal, it is not sufficient to improve incrementally on the techniques…

07/09/2017 No Comments

Rostelecom demonstrates first multivendor transport SDN PoC

Rostelecom Demonstrates On-Demand Transport Services With the First Multivendor Transport SDN PoC in Russia. Rostelecom PJSC announced that is has successfully completed the first proof of concept (PoC) compatibility test for transport software-defined networking (SDN) in Russia. Optical networking equipment from Huawei, NEC and Netcracker and Nokia was included in the PoC, as well as their corresponding domain SDN controllers were managed by an umbrella transport…

06/09/2017 No Comments

I want a business outcome, not a deployment challenge

"We can look and take lessons on how services evolved in the cloud space. Our customers have expressed how they want to take these services and want a business outcome, not a deployment challenge." Shawn Hakl. Make no mistake, cloud OSS is still a deployment challenge (at this nascent stage at least), but in the context of OSS, Shawn Hakl's quote asks the question, "who carries…

06/09/2017 No Comments

Be afraid, be very afraid

"Just because you're afraid of doing something doesn't give you a permission slip to not do it." Debbie Millman. There's a lot of fear in OSS. So many things can go wrong (the OctopOSS theory), so much incompetence is created, so many nearly insurmountable integration challenges await and their complexity means that there is no perfect plan going into a project. They do require a leap…

31/08/2017 No Comments

Can you define why OSS projects are so challenging?

Answer. Change creates incompetence. Whether on the vendor/integrator side, the customer side or along the strategic advisor line, OSS projects bring about constant change; massive change. I've often wondered why I can feel so incompetent in the world of OSS, even though I know more about it than (probably) any other topic. The answer has just dawned on me, as per above - change creates incompetence.…

30/08/2017 No Comments

How would Einstein or Darwin manage an OSS?

"Here are a few questions I reflect on: - Am I excited to be doing what I'm doing or am I in aimless motion? - Are the trade-offs between work and my relationships well-balanced? - How can I speed up the process from where I am to where I want to go? - What big opportunities am I not pursuing that I potentially could? - What's…

29/08/2017 No Comments

Functional silos can be dysfunctional

OSS are often delivered into large organisational structures, structures that are functionally siloed. For large OSS, even the OSS team can have multiple functional silos. Where there are functional silos, there are activities within OSS that need to be delivered across silos. That's where things can get a bit dysfunctional. Jurisdictions, ownership of responsibilities, agreements on approach, misalignments of performance indicators, downstream impacts and dare I…

28/08/2017 No Comments

VMware scores ‘Huge Win’ with Vodafone for NFV

"VMware Scores ‘Huge Win’ with Vodafone for NFV" according to SDxCentral.com. VMware scored a “huge win” with Vodafone as a new network functions virtualization (NFV) customer, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said yesterday. “We have seen a strong start to Q3; we just signed our largest-ever telco deal with Vodafone,” Gelsinger said on VMware’s second quarter fiscal year 2018 earnings conference call. He called the Vodafone deal…

27/08/2017 No Comments

When in doubt, connect

"When in doubt, connect. That's what fast-growing, important organizations do. Making stuff is great. Making connections is even better." Seth Godin in his post here. Simple words. Simple concept. Interesting message.... with a traffic-light of OSS layers. Layer 1 - A connection red light The more connections an OSS has, the more enriched the data tends to become. However, by contrast the more interconnected an OSS…

24/08/2017 No Comments

Cisco to acquire Springpath

Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Springpath. Cisco announced its intent to acquire Springpath, Inc, a Sunnyvale-based leader in hyperconvergence software. This acquisition [reportedly for $320M] will allow Cisco to continue to deliver next-generation data center innovation to its customers. Springpath has developed a distributed file system purpose-built for hyperconvergence that enables server-based storage systems. The acquisition is the culmination of a long-standing strategic relationship between Cisco…

23/08/2017 No Comments

Instead of the easy metrics…

"What is it that you hope to accomplish? Not what you hope to measure as a result of this social media strategy/launch, but to actually change, create or build? An easy but inaccurate measurement will only distract you. It might be easy to calibrate, arbitrary and do-able, but is that the purpose of your work? I know that there's a long history of a certain metric…

23/08/2017 No Comments

The trickle-down effect

There's an interesting thing with off-the-shelf OSS solutions that are subsequently highly customised by the buyer. I call it the trickle-down effect. By nature, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions tend to be designed to cope with as many variants as their designers can imagine. They're designed to be inclusive in nature. But customised COTS solutions tend to narrow down that field of view, adding specific actions, filters, etc…

22/08/2017 No Comments

The alternative to canned OSS reports

Reports are an important interaction type into any OSS, obviously. What's less well observed is the time (ie cost) it can take to create and curate canned reports. [BTW in my crude terminology, Canned Reports are ones where the report format and associated query is created / coded and designed to be run more than once in the future] I've seen situations where an organisation has…

21/08/2017 No Comments

CSG extends with DISH

CSG Extends Long-Term Relationship with DISH. CSG Systems International announced that it will extend its agreement with Pay-TV company, DISH, through December 31, 2021. Under a four-year extended agreement, CSG will continue to provide revenue management and customer care support for DISH’s residential video subscribers. "As a trusted partner, CSG has helped DISH evolve our customer experience over the years," said John Swieringa, executive vice president…

18/08/2017 No Comments

The top-down, bottom-up design process

When planning out a full-stack business / network / services management solution, I tend to follow the top-down, bottom-up design process. Let's take the TMN pyramid as a starting point: Image courtesy of www.researchgate.net Bottom-up: When designing the assurance stream (eg alarms, performance, etc), I start at the bottom (Network Elements), understanding what devices exist in the network and what events / notifications / monitors they…

18/08/2017 No Comments

Netcracker to offer multivendor 5G-ready platform

NEC Corporation of Malaysia/Netcracker Collaborates With Red Hat, Juniper Networks and Dell EMC to Offer End-to-End Multivendor 5G-Ready Platform for Service Providers and Enterprises. NEC Corporation of Malaysia Sdn. Bhd. and Netcracker Technology announced their collaboration with technology giants Red Hat, Juniper Networks and Dell EMC to offer an end-to-end multivendor 5G-ready virtualization platform for service providers and enterprises in Malaysia. The partnership, building off its…

17/08/2017 No Comments

The OSS Mechanical Turk

"The Mechanical Turk... was a fake chess-playing machine constructed in the late 18th century. From 1770 until its destruction by fire in 1854 it was exhibited by various owners as an automaton, though it was eventually revealed to be an elaborate hoax. The Turk was in fact a mechanical illusion that allowed a human chess master hiding inside to operate the machine. With a skilled operator,…