Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

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

SK Telecom commercializes NFV MANO platform named ‘T-MANO’

SK Telecom commercializes NFV MANO platform named 'T-MANO'. SK Telecom announced that it commercialized T-MANO, an NFV MANO (Network Functions Virtualization Management and Orchestration) platform that performs integrated management and orchestration of virtualized network equipment and software. *NFV MANO (network functions virtualization management and orchestration), also called MANO, is an architectural framework for managing and orchestrating virtualized network functions (VNFs) and other software components. The European…

14/07/2017 No Comments

Is OSS tech-debt good debt or bad debt?

"But what if it's ALL tech-debt? Everything we build needs to be supported for its natural life. The more we accumulate, the more that needs supporting. Support represents all the debt we leave behind, like going on a credit-card fuelled spending spree. And like any other debt, the more you collect, the more it compounds (due to the handshake analogy)." More details here. If we consider…

13/07/2017 No Comments

What if it’s all tech-debt??

I've noticed the term "tech debt" entering the OSS vernacular to represent stuff that is built now as a short-term workaround before the long-term solution comes online. But what if it's ALL tech-debt? Everything we build needs to be supported for its natural life. The more we accumulate, the more that needs supporting. Support represents all the debt we leave behind, like going on a credit-card…

12/07/2017 No Comments

Ericsson modernizes real-time charging for VNPT

Ericsson modernizes real-time charging for VNPT in Vietnam. VNPT, a leading telecom operator in Vietnam, has chosen Ericsson as a strategic partner to modernize its charging and business support system. The modernization will enable service convergence and advanced charging capabilities, and improve the user experience for VNPT’s 40 million pre-paid and post-paid subscribers. The new system will also reduce operational costs and lay the foundation for…

12/07/2017 No Comments

Channelling “Intel Inside” to improve the brand recognition of your OSS

"During Intel’s marketing of “Intel Inside” they taught consumers to look for the Intel Inside logo as an assurance of quality. Consumers eventually came to see “Intel Inside” as a standard and began asking the question: “Why doesn’t your product use Intel processors?” This standard became so important that today it is one of the world’s largest co-operative marketing programs,where hundreds of computer companies license the…

11/07/2017 2 Comments

AT&T Investing up to $200 Million in ONAP Venture Capital Fund

AT&T Investing up to $200 Million in Venture Capital Fund. AT&T* has committed to investing up to $200 million in a venture capital fund as part of its ongoing effort to develop solutions to the toughest technology challenges. AT&T will work with Coral’s Communications Industry Platform (CIP) team to identify and invest in start-up companies focused on connected services and platforms. “This investment is part of…

08/07/2017 No Comments

…And it works with Alexa

In the past we've posed the concept of using a search front-end as a user friendly interface to the OSS of the future. This UI would have the ability to poll all of the disparate systems that make up an OSS / BSS stack and curate responses. The front-end would need to be smart, but I wonder whether its clever curation of data would actually reduce…

06/07/2017 No Comments

The interview question tech recruiters will never ask, but should

Over the last few days, this blog has been diving into the career steps that OSS (and tech) specialists can make in readiness for the inevitable changes in employment dynamics that machine learning and AI will bring about. You've heard all the stories about robots and AI taking all of our jobs. Any job that is repeatable and / or easy to learn will be automated.…

05/07/2017 No Comments

Next step, man-machine partnerships

Getting literate in the language of the future posed the thought that data is the language of the future and therefore it is incumbent on all OSS practitioners to ensure their literacy. It also posed that data literacy provides a stepping stone to a future where machine learning is more prevalent. This got me thinking. We currently think about man-machine interfaces where we design ways for…

04/07/2017 No Comments

Getting literate in the language of the future

As we all know, digitalisation of everything is decreasing barriers to entry and increasing the speed of change in almost every perceivable industry. Unfortunately, this probably also means the half-life of opportunity exploitation is also shrinking. The organisations that seem to be best at leveraging opportunities in the market are the ones that are able to identify and act the quickest. They identify and act quickly...…

03/07/2017 No Comments

Nokia completes acquisition of Comptel

Nokia completes acquisition of Comptel. Nokia announced the successful completion of its acquisition of Comptel Corporation, a Finland-based telecommunications software company. The acquisition was announced February 9, 2017. The acquisition advances Nokia's strategy to build a standalone software business at scale by expanding and strengthening its software portfolio and go-to-market capabilities. Comptel bolsters Nokia's software portfolio by adding capabilities that help digital service providers bring new…

01/07/2017 No Comments

Finding the metrics to invert the OSS iceberg

"Invert the iceberg - show just how much capability is hidden under the surface by mapping how dependant the organisation's positive outcomes are on its OSS (OSS as the puppet-master). All the sexy stuff (eg 5G, IoT, network virtualisation, etc) can only be monetised if our OSS pull all the strings to make them happen." Yesterday's post. Have you noticed that network teams and network vendors…

30/06/2017 No Comments

Inverting the iceberg to get more funding for your OSS

In the last couple of days, we've discussed frameworks that could allow CSPs to design disruptive business models around factors that our OSS / BSS can control. Not exactly riveting stuff for the tech-heads amongst the reader-base, but relevant for the amount of investment that gets directed into the tech projects that we all work on. Let me get a little more specific today. We only…

29/06/2017 No Comments

Redknee Unified signs with Smart in the Philippines

Redknee Unified Deployed at Smart as Customer Demand Quickly Grows in the Philippines. Redknee Solutions Inc. announced that Smart Communications (Smart) in the Philippines has awarded Redknee a services and support contract. Redknee Unified is an agile, flexible, and scalable converged billing, charging, and customer care platform that allows service providers to enhance their competitiveness and maximize value by quickly launching new revenue streams and service…