Gartner Magic Quadrant for IRCM for CSPs
Gartner's latest report, "Gartner Magic Quadrant for Integrated Revenue and Customer Management for CSPs" can be downloaded here courtesy of Ericsson.
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14/12/2016
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Gartner's latest report, "Gartner Magic Quadrant for Integrated Revenue and Customer Management for CSPs" can be downloaded here courtesy of Ericsson.
Read More »One of the things that I've noticed when organisations are looking to select a new OSS is that there is a tendency to focus on the functionality. That's one way and it can be a successful way of identifying the requirements that you need to benchmark against. I've also helped organisations with their vendor selection processes using an approach based on this model. However, over time…
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Read More »In earlier blogs, we've referenced this great article on SingularityHub to show how the exponentiality of technological progress tends to surprise us as change initially creeps up on us, then overwhelms us in situations like this: But what if we changed the "exponential growth surprise factor" in the diagram above to "opportunity cost?" Further to yesterday's blog about the uselessness but value of making predictions, we…
Read More »"Planning is useless but planning is invaluable. Predictions are useless but invaluable." Scott Galloway. The world of OSS, if it's even called that anymore, is in a rapid state of change. Business models, delivery models, network topologies, IT platforms, test methodologies and more are creating impacts that are changing our industries and that's not even taking into account the innovative and disruptive OSS products that are…
Read More »Yesterday's blog spoke of building an ultra-cut-down version of OSS products to get them in and working quickly. That blog leads into an interesting concept being used in the Agile world, Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) [Hat tip to Scott for bringing this to my attention]. "WSJF is a scheduling algorithm (or if you prefer, prioritisation method) that maximises the amount of whatever it is you…
Read More »The OSS market has two ends of a continuum - one end consisting of what I refer to as "the self-service customer" (ie highly repeatable) and the other being "the requirement of one customer," (ie highly customised). Naturally there are contracts that fall on the continuum between these two extremes too. The self-service end of the market has proven to be a successful niche for some…
Read More »Yesterday's blog discussed the fact that many of the KPIs gathered and used by OSS / BSS could potentially conflict with other KPIs, even when used within a single organisation. It then posed a question: "Have you ever seen an organisation define a simplification metric as one of their highest-profile KPIs?" One of the biggest hurdles facing OSS projects, as described here in The triple constraint…
Read More »Anyone involved with OSS will know that it is a DBA (Death By Acronym) experience. We have so many acronyms to deal with, some known globally, others only with relevance to a specific organization. One of the most common acronyms is the KPI (Key Performance Indicators). What's scary is that the KPI is a catch-all phrase for a set of metrics that invariably have their own…
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Read More »Have you noticed that TM Forum's eTOM seems to be used in common vernacular when people talk about mapping and/or comparing products. eTOM and TAM are both quite closely linked (you'll notice the similarities in colour-banding between the two). However, eTOM is more of a standardized mapping of workflows, whereas TAM is more of a mapping of standardized product functionalities. Since workflows follow a journey, often through multiple…
Read More »Yesterday's blogged posited that the OSS sales process - of joining a customer and a vendor to form a sales contract - tends to have serious flaws. Whilst deals still get done (you can see enough of them by clicking on the "News" category here on PAOSS), I've yet to see a deal where both parties were ecstatic about the whole process, notwithstanding the excitement of…
Read More »A couple of facts about the OSS market that you've probably already noticed - It's highly fragmented and the selling cycle tends to average 12-18 months. This means that cost of sales and cost of acquisition are a source of frustration for each side of the equation. Over the years, I've been privileged to have regularly sat on either side of the OSS buying equation. I've worked…
Read More »Analytics is a term that has caught fire in IT relatively recently. In many ways, our OSS have been doing "analytics" for years, albeit not necessarily with the same tools at their disposal. If we simplify the term down to the use case of "being able to ask questions of a massive data store" then that's what OSS have been doing almost since their inception decades…
Read More »"So, I asked myself, why? Why aren't businesses taking the opportunity to digitize and improve at the same time? The answer I suspect is because many digitizing programmes sit on a hot-bed of over-engineering. Oftentimes this means adopting"strategic" business platforms which require companies to adapt their processes to fit them rather than the other way round. Sometimes, it can mean hiring expensive contractors that don't understand…
Read More »In recent times, I did some work at a tier-1 telco where an adjacent project was implementing a major changeover of an essential OSS / BSS platform. The old suite is acknowledged as having lots of legacy data, processes, etc. And when I say legacy, I mean stuff that hasn't been used for years, just clogging up the system rather than old but still useful. The…
Read More »As you've all noticed, "cost-out" is one of the biggest justification techniques used in the OSS industry. The theory is that if you can automate activities, then you can reduce head-count from the operations team, thus reducing costs. While I'm happy to help customers build business cases around this perspective, I have a slight divergence that I share with them and am sharing with you today.…
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