Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

Digital twins

"Well-designed digital twins based on business priorities have the potential to significantly improve enterprise decision making. Enterprise architecture and technology innovation leaders must factor digital twins into their Internet of Things architecture and strategy" Gartner's Top 10 Technology Trends. Digital twinning has established some buzz, particularly in IoT circles lately. Digital twins are basically digital representations of physical assets, including their status, characteristics, performance and behaviors.…

03/05/2017 No Comments

Designing your way out of jeopardy

In an earlier post entitled, "Looking Forward to Jeopardy and Fall-outs," I described a method for projecting forward to the likelihood of a design falling into a failure state and using that data to drive continual improvement. Not only that, but to drive the future of self-service telco designs, as I'll describe today! The diagram below shows the concept of a design tree. This tree can…

02/05/2017 No Comments

Kafka stands before the law

Many of you will have heard of Kafka. Some may not. In a similar dichotomy, today I'll take two tangents on Kafka. The binding comes from Jay Kreps, the founder of Kafka the distributed streaming messaging system, who also happened to enjoy Franz Kafka's writings and named his open-source project after the writer. I'd become aware of a couple of telcos beginning to use Kafka (as…

01/05/2017 No Comments

Virgin Media selects Netcracker

Virgin Media Leverages Netcracker's Managed Services for Revenue Management. Netcracker Technology announced that Virgin Media has expanded its relationship with Netcracker by selecting it as the managed services provider of choice for its Revenue Management solution. By using Netcracker's Managed Services, Virgin Media will be able to scale more flexibly while reducing the cost of operations. Virgin Media, part of the world’s largest international cable company,…

01/05/2017 No Comments

The implications of a handshake

The handshake analogy compares: The number of people at a gathering to the number of handshakes required to greet them all; with The number of systems in an environment to the number of interfaces required to inter-link them (and associated complexity)). 1 person (system) = 0 handshakes (ie nobody else to shake hands with => 0 interfaces). 2 people (systems) = 1 handshake (1 interface) 3 people…

28/04/2017 1 Comment

Total eclipse of the start-up

. Did you notice that I was channeling Bonnie Tyler in the title there? No? No matter... The concept in the diagram above is courtesy of Roger Gibson (yes, I made you [more] famous Roger). Obviously, it is showing that business models and technology are increasingly overlapping. This simple diagram also shows why the business/technology eclipse can only increase the relevance of OSS (in some shape…

27/04/2017 No Comments

OSS chat bots

"Some pilots are proving quite interesting in enhancing Network Operations. Especially when AI / ML is used in the form of Natural language processing – NOC operators are talking to a ML system in natural language and asking questions in context to an alarm about deep topics ( BGP, 4G eUTRAN, etc). Do more with L1 engineers. – Use of familiar chat front ends like FB…

26/04/2017 2 Comments

Communications Support Systems (CSS)

Have you ever worked in a big telco (or any large organisation for that matter)? Have you ever noticed the disconnection in knowledge / information? On a recent project, I was brought in as an external consultant to find potential improvements to one business unit's specific key performance indicator (KPI). As a consultant, my role is a connector - a connector of people, ideas, projects, products,…

25/04/2017 No Comments

Looking forward to jeopardy and fall-outs

When we find that orders have gone into (are about to go into) a jeopardy state or a fall-out state, the experts are brought in and tend to work backwards to identify the problem and resolve it. But what if our OSS were able to predict the likelihood of future failure and present that information to operators? What if a certain series of similar steps /…

24/04/2017 No Comments

Out-running the bear

"A bear jumps out of a bush and starts chasing two hikers. They both start running for their lives, but then one of them stops to put on his running shoes. His friends says, "What are you doing? You can't out-run a bear!" His friend replies, "I don't have to out-run the bear. I only have to out-run you!"" Let's say the two friends represent competing…

21/04/2017 No Comments

OSS are too important to be just cost centres

When we distill it down, what are telcos selling? They're selling connections. Whether it's connecting with information, a group, another person, even a virtual assistant or machine-to-machine, we tend to use communications services to connect. Networks are an important component to establish those connections. OSS go a step further. They help to establish a connection but also help to maintain the ability to connect - via…

20/04/2017 No Comments

Omni-experience orchestration

I've been seeing a lot of references to continual development methodologies lately (ie references to agile, DevOps, CI/CD, etc). Quotes like focus on projects rather than the mission statement, focus on products rather than projects, etc. The core principle is in chunking workload down into modular pieces that can be implemented to give flexibility and agility to meet evolving customer demands. These approaches are claimed to…

19/04/2017 No Comments

Just a month to go until my first talk at TM Forum Live

It's only a month til TM Forum Live kicks off for 2017. I'm scheduled to give a talk on microservices (amongst other things). Drop me a line if you're going too and would like to catch up in Nice.

18/04/2017 2 Comments

The greatest currency is success

Whether it's at an individual, business unit or organisational level, demonstrated achievement on OSS projects tends to lead to greater opportunities and rewards. There are so many OSS projects underway globally and so much expertise required, but there are a high proportion of projects that don't deliver or are currently stagnating. This means opportunity. However, we generally don't tend to use testimonials as much as we…

13/04/2017 No Comments

Bending over backwards

Over the years, I've dealt with (and worked with) many vendors, as I'm sure you have too. Some will bend over backwards to help their customers (or potential customers) out, finding workarounds to their own internal rules to help make something good happen. Others will persuade their customers into signing a contract before bending their customers over backwards, finding internal rules to their own workarounds to…

12/04/2017 No Comments

A thousand AI flowers to bloom for OSS?

"AI startups are becoming cheaper and easier to build, because many of the underlying technologies are now mature enough to apply predictably, and because of the declining cost of cloud computing – including many AI as a service products on AWS and Google Cloud. I liken this development to the time when cloud computing first emerged around ten years ago. Resources that were previously the preserve…

11/04/2017 2 Comments

An OSS data input quandary

"In writing or in life, people who are successful focus on the input (putting in). Those who aren't successful focus on the output (taking out)." Paraphrasing Tucker Max during a podcast with James Altucher. In the post that follows, you'll notice that I'm putting a completely different context on Tucker's quote above, which is a new spin on the old adage of, "you get out what…

10/04/2017 No Comments

Comptel partners with Capana

Comptel Partners with Capana to Strengthen Intelligent Data Capabilities. Comptel Corporation announced that it has signed a global partnership agreement with Capana Corporation, a provider of revenue management solutions. Capana’s CapSettle product supports operators to cost-effectively deploy fast and accurate traditional interconnect and roaming solutions as well as multi-partner settlements solutions. Comptel will resell CapSettle within its Intelligent Data solution portfolio, introducing a wholesale approach to…

09/04/2017 No Comments

Acting yourself into a new way of OSS thinking

"It is easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking, than it is to think yourself into a new way of acting." Millard Fuller. The agile, lean documentation delivery models of today have the huge advantage of gaining momentum on OSS projects. No longer do we have the big-bang cutovers, but we start with barely viable solutions and progressively build on them. It starts…

07/04/2017 No Comments

How ONAP will merge ECOMP and Open-O

How ONAP Will Merge Millions of Lines of Code from ECOMP and Open-O. (Repost from SDxCentral). How long does it take to merge eight million lines of code from AT&T’s ECOMP framework with the code from the Open-O project, which is also very large? Now that ECOMP and Open-O have merged into one project under the Linux Foundation — the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) —…