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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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,…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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.…
Read More »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…
Read More ».... 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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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.…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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,…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »Buckeye Broadband Selects CSG International to Launch New Services and Enhance Customer Experience. CSG Systems International announced that Buckeye Broadband will use CSG’s market-leading revenue and customer management solutions to power the next evolution of its services and overall customer experience. Buckeye Broadband is a full-service provider of cable, internet, and phone services for more than 170,000 residential and commercial subscribers across Northwest Ohio and Southeast…
Read More »Comptel Has Received a Significant Order from a New Customer in the Middle East. Comptel has received a significant order from a new customer in the Middle East.The deal includes licenses and services for the convergent mediation software solution embedded with analytical capabilities for Operational Intelligence. The value of the deal is approximately 2.6 million EUR. “With our consolidated Data Refinery platform our new customer can…
Read More »Comptel Has Received a Major Order from a European Wholesale Operator. Comptel has signed a new multi-year contract with a European wholesale operator. This is a new customer for Comptel. The contract value is 1.9M EUR, and it comprises FlowOne Fulfillment licenses and related services. “Capability to manage complex orders from multiple operators and the flexibility to adapt to their processes and their customer’s processes are…
Read More »Nokia Motive Service Management Platform deployed by KDDI in Japan to deliver superior customer care. Nokia announced that Japanese communications service provider KDDI has deployed the Nokia Motive Service Management Platform (SMP) to deliver superior customer care by streamlining and improving the resolution of issues for its millions of mobile subscribers. Nokia Motive SMP allows KDDI to improve the detection, troubleshooting and resolution of issues during…
Read More »Nokia, Vodafone and Telit collaborate to expand the IoT ecosystem using NB-IoT technology. Nokia, Vodafone and Telit, are collaborating to expand the Internet of Things ecosystem using Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) technology. Nokia has deployed a fully integrated NB-IoT system at Vodafone's 'Open Lab' in Dusseldorf, Germany using its radio access network and elements from its Cloud Packet Core solution. The system leverages IoT technology from Telit and…
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