Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

Warren Buffett’s “avoid at all costs” OSS backlog

During the last week, this blog-roll has talked about the benefits, but also the challenges facing implementation techniques like Agile in the world of OSS. There's no doubt that they're good at breaking down challenges into smaller pieces for implementation. Unfortunately there's also the risk of doing for the sake of doing - stuffing more stuff into the backlog - without necessarily thinking of the long-term…

08/08/2017 No Comments

SaskTel transforms

SaskTel transforms for the future with next generation Order Management, Inventory, Assignment and Provisioning Solution. SaskTel International announced the successful implementation of their next generation Order Management, Inventory, Assignment and Provisioning solution, Optius, into SaskTel's business operations. SaskTel is a leading communications service provider in Canada with over 1.4 million customer connections and $1.2 billion in annual revenue. In order to continue to evolve the company…

08/08/2017 No Comments

Should your OSS have an exit strategy in mind?

What does the integration map of your OSS suite look like? Does it have lots of meatballs with a spaghetti of interconnections? Is it possibly even too entangled that even creating an integration map would be a nightmare? Similarly, how many customisations have you made to your out-of-the-box tools? In recent posts we've discussed the frenzy of doing without necessarily considering the life-time costs of all…

07/08/2017 No Comments

Are we passing right past the importance of thinking?

"Are we spawning a maelstrom, the butterfly effect from all of our doing?" Yesterday's post pondered the question of whether we're getting entangled in our frenzy for doing. I've been privileged to have worked in a dozen countries or more and even more privileged to be an Australian. Less proud am I though of the way of working that seems to pervade our corporate icons. I've…

04/08/2017 No Comments

Cisco completes Viptela acquisition

Cisco Completes Viptela Acquisition. Cisco announced the close of its acquisition of Viptela [for $610M], a privately held company based in San Jose, CA that delivers a cloud-first, software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) solution. In June, Cisco announced it is rewriting the enterprise networking blueprint with a new generation of intent-based networking solutions. Viptela’s software-driven, cloud-first architecture for the WAN fits well with Cisco’s Digital Network…

03/08/2017 No Comments

Are we becoming too focused on doing?

"At least DO SOMETHING! DO! Don't think, don't hope, do! At least you can come off and say 'I did this, I shepherded, I played on. At least I did something" John Kennedy. The following clip shows some of Australian Rules Football's finest motivators, including a snippet of the speech from John Kennedy as quoted above. Something has dawned on me today. For years I've been…

03/08/2017 No Comments

People pay for two things. What about OSS?

"People pay for two things: Results: You do something they couldn’t do for themselves. Convenience: You do something they don’t want to do for themselves, or you make something difficult easier to do." Ramit Sethi. I really like the way Ramit has broken down an infinite number of variants down to just two key categories. Off the top of my head, these categories of payment (ie…

02/08/2017 No Comments

I’m an OSS, you need to trust me

"We believe in nurturing a trust-based relationship with our partners to create effective innovative projects together." I won't mention which vendor executive coined this phrase, but it's representative of many vendors' sentiments. Easy words to say, but harder to earn (individually or as an organisation) and harder still to prove to others. OSS / BSS have typically used trust as an internal mechanism, a means to…

01/08/2017 No Comments

The Starbucks Effect – Scaling your OSS seems sexy

"While we were talking about this permanent shop, which he still hadn’t opened, his attention would often drift to his next shop. And the one after that. And after that. And then building an app to make online ordering easy. And then, becoming the next Starbucks. Whoa. Hold on, man, I told him. I get it, scaling the business seems sexy. But, I said, that is…

31/07/2017 No Comments

Short-sighted / long-sighted OSS

"When I hear that the average tenure in tech is just two years, I wonder how anyone gets anything done. When I hear such job hopping justified by the fact that changing companies is the only way to get a raise, I just shake my head at the short-sightedness of such companies." David Heinemeier Hansson here on Signal v Noise. Have you noticed how your most…

28/07/2017 No Comments

Oracle’s new Monetization Cloud service

New service complements Oracle ERP Cloud and Oracle Customer Experience Cloud Suite to provide monetization across the customer journey. Oracle announced Oracle Monetization Cloud. The new cloud service accelerates time to market for digital and subscription-based products and services by enabling the full life cycle of customer on-boarding, offer creation, robust rating and discounting, billing, customized invoicing and reporting. Enterprises are increasingly focused on generating recurring…

28/07/2017 No Comments

Hyperledger Adds Cisco as a Premier Member

Hyperledger Adds Cisco as a Premier Member. Hyperledger, an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies, announced today that Cisco has upgraded its General membership to Premier. As a Premier member, Ram Jagadeesan, Cisco Distinguished Engineer and Blockchain CTO, will join the Hyperledger Governing Board. Cisco joins other Premier members: Accenture, Airbus, American Express, Change Healthcare, CME Group, Deutsche Borse Group, Daimler, Digital…

27/07/2017 No Comments

Hell’s Kitchen, OSS style

Gordon Ramsay used to run a TV show called Hell's Kitchen where he would take a failing restaurant and would attempt to transform it one expletive at a time. I'm not remotely interested in reality kitchen shows but I did watch a couple of episodes of this one. Enough to notice a trend happening. He would always: Simplify the menu Seek to understand the customers and…

26/07/2017 No Comments

It’s all about the variants

"I've been involved in telecom operations for decades, and I've learned that there is nothing in networking as inertial as OSS/BSS. A large minority of my experts (but still a minority) think that we should scrap the whole OSS/BSS model and simply integrate operations tasks with the service models of SDN and NFV orchestration. That's possible too, and we'll have to wait to see if there's…

25/07/2017 2 Comments

Telus and Nuage Networks launch new SD-WAN platform

Telus and Nuage Networks launch new SD-WAN platform. Telus, a Canadian telecommunications company, announced it is teaming up with Nuage Networks, a Nokia venture, to initiate Telus Network as a Service (NaaS), software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) platform. SD-WAN is an emerging network architecture that decouples network control and forwarding functions. The technology enables businesses to create, manage and optimize WAN connections. Telus joined forces with…

21/07/2017 No Comments

CSG International extends with Charter

CSG International Expands and Extends Relationship with Charter Four More Years. CSG Systems International, Inc. announced that it will expand and extend its agreement with Charter Communications (NASDAQ: CHTR) through December 31, 2021. Charter is a leading broadband communications company and the second largest cable operator in the United States. In 2016, the company merged with Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, creating a single…

21/07/2017 No Comments

What would you do in this situation?

The world of OSS, no matter where you are placed within its orbit, seems to be chaotic. There are always so many things to get done - updates, fixes, incidents, planning, designs, meetings, emails, etc, etc. I'd love to hear what you would do if the following situation presented itself: Every week, you get a four hour block of time (at a time of your choosing)…

19/07/2017 No Comments

Telcos still innovate… but more by proxy now

CSPs globally are trying to be innovative, and being heavily involved in tech since their earliest days, always perceive themselves to be innovative to their core (yes, bad pun). There's no doubt that there is a lot of innovation happening in large CSPs, but I wonder how much of it is really attributable to the CSP? Much of the change swirling through our organisations (or customer…

18/07/2017 No Comments

Ramping down network variants, ramping up digital variants

Voice and data are no longer the services that organisations, large and small, see as making a difference. The services that do make a difference are more dynamic and diverse - digital distribution, promotion and marketing, payments and billing, business intelligence, business continuity (including security) and more - the factors that make their organisations thrive. Our OSS and BSS are currently complex due to all the…

17/07/2017 No Comments

Cisco announces intent to acquire Observable Networks

Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Observable Networks. The ability to dramatically improve visibility, security and response capabilities across an entire IT surface, including highly distributed branch environments and public cloud infrastructures, is becoming increasingly important as companies and organizations continue their digital transformation. With this in mind, I am pleased to announce Cisco’s intent to acquire Observable Networks, a privately held software company headquartered in St.…

15/07/2017 No Comments

The three big lies of the telecoms industry

“What are the three big lies of the telecoms industry? The first lie is that data monetisation is coming. Well we are still waiting. The second is that we have billions of customers. Well are they really our customers or are they people who just tolerate us and are really customers of someone else? The third lie is that we are utility so we have stable…

14/07/2017 No Comments

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