Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

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,…

17/08/2017 No Comments

OSS billionaires with perfect abs

"If [more] information was the answer, then we'd all be billionaires with perfect abs.” Derek Sivers. The sharing economy has made a deluge of information available to us at negligible cost. We have more information available at our fingertips than we can ever consume and process. So why don't we all have massive bank balances and perfect abs? (although I'm sure most PAOSS readers do of…

16/08/2017 No Comments

Is commission management the key for next-gen OSS?

"Relationships with the things we ‘consume’ (rather than ‘own’) are increasing, and are being governed by ongoing supply arrangements between customers and vendors. What sits at the heart of these relationships, from a financial perspective, is billing. The entity that has the billing relationship with the customer essentially ‘owns’ the customer – they have the right to communicate with the customer regularly, and this can form…

15/08/2017 2 Comments

What is your lead domino?

OSS can be complicated beasts with many tentacles. It can make starting a new project daunting. When I start, I like to use a WBS to show all the tentacles (people, processes, technology, contracts) on a single page, then look for the lead domino (or dominoes). A lead domino is the first piece, the one that starts the momentum and makes a load of other pieces…

14/08/2017 No Comments

Grupo Gtd selects Netcracker

Grupo Gtd Selects Netcracker's Comprehensive BSS, OSS and Virtualization Suite as the Foundation for Digital Transformation. NEC Corporation and Netcracker Technology announced that Grupo Gtd has selected the Netcracker 12 suite, comprised of next-generation BSS/OSS and virtualization capabilities, to enable its large-scale IT consolidation, transformation and network virtualization program. As the foundational platform, Netcracker 12 will help Grupo Gtd to consolidate systems, standardize operations and deliver…

10/08/2017 No Comments

AIOps (Algorithmic IT Operations)

"AIOps stands for Algorithmic IT Operations and is a new category as defined by Gartner research that is an evolution of what the industry previously referred to as ITOA (IT Operations and Analytics). We have reached a point where data science and algorithms are being successfully applied to automate traditionally manual tasks and processes in IT Operations. Now, algorithmics are being incorporated into tools that allow…

10/08/2017 No Comments

Could you replace a 150-person OSS team with just 1?

In 1998 Berkshire Hathaway acquired a reinsurance company called General Re. "The only significant staff change that followed the merger was the elimination of General Re's investment unit. Some 150 people had been in charge of deciding where to invest the company's funds; they were replaced with just one individual - Warren Buffett." Robert G. Hagstrom in, "The Warren Buffett Way." Following on from yesterday's post…

09/08/2017 No Comments

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

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