Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

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.…

13/01/2017 No Comments

China Mobile Selects Nuage Networks SDN

China Mobile Selects Nuage Networks Software Defined Networking to Open New Era of Public Cloud. Nuage Networks, the Nokia venture focused on software-defined networking (SDN) solutions, announced that China Mobile (CMCC) has selected its Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) to implement CMCC's first commercial public cloud project based on SDN technology. China Mobile is the largest telecommunications company in China and has been rapidly expanding its large…

12/01/2017 No Comments

Procedures, supply chains, smart contracts and how they save costs

This week we've discussed standard operating procedures, dynamic / variable operating procedures and touched on how they impact a future supply / value chain that is far more digitised and potentially has far more actors involved (eg freelance resources). The digital trust mechanisms of blockchain open up opportunities for smart contracts to change the way businesses operate. Smart contracts have the potential to remove the need…

12/01/2017 No Comments

Working on the business rather than in the business of OSS

Blogs from the last two days have covered the dilemma of dynamic operating procedures and why the standard operating procedures of the past are perhaps too idealistic a concept. Despite this, I still try to build repeatability into the various aspects of OSS delivery - initial installation, documentation, demonstrations, training, testing (and regression testing), etc. This concept was one of my key take-aways from the book,…

11/01/2017 No Comments

Standard Operating Procedures… or Variable Operating Procedures

Yesterday's blog discussed the importance, but (perhaps) mythical concept of Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for service providers and their OSS / BSS. The number of variants, which I can only see amplifying into the future, makes it almost futile to try to implement SOPs. I say "almost futile" because SOPs are theoretically possible if the number of variants can be significantly compressed. But given that I…

10/01/2017 No Comments

Standard operating procedures… or are they?

Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) have been pivotal in codifying and standardising the use cases of service providers for many years. The theory goes that if you can standardise a process, then you can produce repeatably high quality and streamline it in a cycle of continual improvement. The repeatability objective is one* of two primary recollections from a book that I read many years ago called The…

09/01/2017 No Comments

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