"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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »"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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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)…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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.…
Read More »“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…
Read More »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…
Read More »"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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »"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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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.…
Read More »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…
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