Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

Platforms are eating the world

"The platform strategy has two key elements, and it is important not to confuse them. First is the platform business model, where companies build digital ecosystems or marketplaces connecting customers with producers of goods and/or services, making it easy for them to do business, rather than playing a direct role in the supply chain (think, Airbnb, eBay and Uber). Second is the technology platform, which supports…

08/02/2017 No Comments

Strong orchestration convictions, weakly held

"I first came across the phrase "strong convictions, weakly held" through Marc Andreessen, but a bit of Googling showed me it was originally coined by Paul Saffo, then Director of the Palo Alto Institute for the Future. According to this post he advised his people to think this way for three reasons: •It is the only way to deal with an uncertain future and still move…

07/02/2017 No Comments

The chain-smoker analogy

"Chris Bradley: You had these contests as the smoker between your current self that loved that next cigarette and your future self that didn’t want to live with the consequences of many years of smoking and knew that once you were actually out of that vicious cycle of smoking you would actually be happier. Angus Dawson: And there was the in-between self that was very, very…

03/02/2017 No Comments

Intelligent conversations… that remember customers

In yesterday's post, we spoke about using OSS to augment intelligent conversations that service providers have with their customers. Today we flip that coin and take the perspective of the customer and how those more intelligent conversations help them. Having spent years working on international OSS projects, I've stayed in many different hotels. The ones that I felt most connected to were the ones where the…

02/02/2017 No Comments

Intelligent conversations… augmented by OSS

One of the greatest do-good opportunities for our OSS / BSS / CRM is to provide augmentation to front-line staff to enable them to have intelligent conversations, be that with customers, suppliers, colleagues, etc. Unfortunately we don't always facilitate that to happen. In fact, the proliferation of front-line tools and processes that staff need to deal with often make them look less intelligent to the people…

01/02/2017 No Comments

It’s not the tech, it’s the timing

For those of us in the technology consulting game, we think we're pretty clever at predicting the next big technology trend. But with the proliferation of information over the Internet, it's not that difficult to see potentially beneficial technologies coming over the horizon. We can all see network virtualisation, Internet-connected sensor networks, artificial intelligence, etc coming. The challenge is actually picking the right timing for introducing…

31/01/2017 No Comments

Falling off a cliff vs going to the sky

Have you noticed how the curves we're dealing with in the service provider industry are either falling off a cliff (eg voice revenues) or going to the sky (eg theoretical exponential growth like IoE)? Here in the OSS industry, we're stuck in the middle of these two trend curves too. Falling revenues mean reduced appetite for big IT projects. However, the excitement surrounding exponential technologies like…

30/01/2017 No Comments

Comptel receives order from a Tier-1 in South America

Comptel Has Received a Significant Order from a Global Tier-1 Group Customer in South America. Comptel Has Received a Significant Order from a Global Tier-1 Group Customer in South America. The deal is a continuation of a long technology collaboration between the companies. This order is an expansion of Comptel’s Data Refinery solution. The value of the deal is approximately 1.2 M euros. “We are very…

28/01/2017 No Comments

Moving closer to the sale

"The definition of moving up the value chain will be different for freelancers depending on their industry. But in general, the closer you are to the sale, the higher you will be valued, and the more you can charge. For example, a content writer is just responsible for writing a certain number of blog posts per week. But a content strategist is responsible for the overall…

25/01/2017 No Comments

Wow

No, not "Wow!" the exclamation but the acronym W-O-W. Wow stands for Walk Out Working. In other words, if a customer comes into a retail store, they walk out with a working service rather than exasperation. Whilst many customers wouldn't be aware of it, there are lots of things that have to happen in an OSS / BSS for a customer to be wowed: Order entry…

24/01/2017 No Comments

The modern OSS cycle – to build rather than buy

Have you noticed a changing trend where some of the largest service providers in the world are reverting to building their own OSS / orchestration (ie writing software) rather than buying off-the-shelf? The trends pushing this cycle are software defined networks and agile development models. In the earliest days of OSS, the service providers made their own tools. They developed for their own internal needs and…

23/01/2017 No Comments

Software is eating the world…. and eating your job?

A funny thing happened today. I was looking for a reference to Marc Andreessen's original, "software is eating the world," quote and came across an article on TechCrunch that expressed many of the same thoughts I was going to write about. However, it doesn't specifically cover the service provider and OSS industries so I'll push on, with a few borrowed quotes along the way (in italics,…

20/01/2017 No Comments

HPE to acquire SimpliVity

HPE to Acquire Hyperconverged Player SimpliVity for $650M. Hewlett Packard Enterprise ( NYSE : HPE ) announced a definitive agreement to acquire SimpliVity, a leading provider of software-defined, hyperconverged infrastructure, for $650 million in cash. The hyperconverged market was estimated to be approximately $2.4 billion in 2016, and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 25 percent, to nearly $6 billion, by…

19/01/2017 No Comments

The first step on the path of simplification

The first step of simplification (exiting legacy), be it systems, processes, products, is to know who/what is still using the old thing. Are the users internal (eg admins), external (eg customers) or are the transactions M2M (machine-to-machine)? If M2M, which machines and what are the transactions? This information becomes important for change management (eg transition collaboration and notifications) leading up to the exit. We've spoken many…

19/01/2017 No Comments

Hot on the heels of ECOMP comes Indigo

Since releasing ECOMP (Enhanced control orchestration and management platform), AT&T has been busy on a data sharing environment, which it announced at the AT&T Developer Summit and is called Indigo. Like ECOMP, AT&T is looking to launch Indigo as an Open Source project through the Linux Foundation, hoping for community collaboration. As you all know, machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML/AI) get better with more data.…

18/01/2017 No Comments

How will IoT management platforms integrate with OSS/BSS?

There are clearly similarities and differences between OSS/BSS and IoT Management platforms. For example, you could consider each IoT device like any other network device in terms of the provision, manage and maintain process. The only problem is scale - you may have 100s/1000s of network devices, but could have 10,000s - 100,000s of IoT sensors. Whereas network devices can be managed individually, the scale of…

17/01/2017 No Comments

The end of cloud computing

.... but we've only just started and we haven't even got close to figuring out how to manage it yet (from an aggregated view I mean, not just within a single vendor platform)!! This article from Peter Levine of Andreesen Horowitz predicts "The end of cloud computing." Now I'm not so sure that this headline is going to play out in the near future, but Peter…

16/01/2017 No Comments

Amdocs works with Linux Foundation on OpenECOMP

Amdocs Joins Forces with Linux Foundation to Accelerate OpenECOMP Adoption in Open Source. Amdocs announced that it will partner with the Linux Foundation to accelerate the global adoption of the open source Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy (ECOMP) platform. Hosted by the Linux Foundation, this new project will make ECOMP open source available to service providers and cloud developers in 2017. AT&T have previously announced…

15/01/2017 No Comments

SK Telecom to invest incremental $9B, largely on platforms

SK Telecom has just announced a $9B incremental investment over the next 3 years. SK Telecom’s new CEO Park Jeong-ho told BusinessKorea that his company will invest $9 billion over the next three years in artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), autonomous vehicles, and 5G. Specifically, Jeong-ho said the company will spend $4.17 billion on a new information communications and technology (ICT) system that will…

13/01/2017 No Comments

Marc Andreessen’s platform play for OSS

Marc Andreessen describes platforms as “a system that can be programmed and therefore customized by outside developers — users — and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform’s original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate.” Platform thinking is an important approach for service providers if they want to recapture market share from the OTT play.…