Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

How many truck rolls before you know you have a problem?

Apart from an obvious passion for OSS (is the URL a giveaway?), I also have a passion for real estate and property development. You'd think these fields are a long way removed, but today's story ties them together. I had one multi-townhouse development that took 3.5 years in the council approval cycle. The council team was constantly complaining because they had a mountainous backlog of developments…

28/09/2016 No Comments

Build-measure-learn loops in OSS

"Whilst doing rather than planning has been a hugely successful tactic for entrepreneurs and their investors, before I go any further I want to note that as with everything you can take it too far. To get the best chance of achieving huge success, and avoid getting stuck at a local maxima, a certain amount of thinking should be done before building starts. There’s a balance…

27/09/2016 No Comments

If it’s good for Jeff Bezos

"For a period of time, Jeff Bezos was a heavy investor in marketing, but after a while he retrenched. “About three years ago we stopped doing television advertising. We did a 15-month-long test of TV advertising. And it worked, but not as much as the kind of price elasticity we knew we could get from taking those ad dollars and giving them back to consumers,” said…

26/09/2016 No Comments

To be a better technologist…

... you have to look beyond the technology. Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of catching up with a friend who is CEO and founder of a successful information security consultancy firm. The great thing about his industry at the moment is that there is more demand (ie information and systems that needs to be secured) than supply (ie resources to secure said information /…

23/09/2016 No Comments

ECOMP treading on Open-O MANO toes?

"AT&T made kind of a big deal in July about working with the Linux Foundation to create an open source group around its Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management, and Policy (ECOMP) platform. But the Linux Foundation has not yet announced ECOMP as an official project. Perhaps there’s a snag due to the fact that ECOMP includes software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) management and network…

22/09/2016 No Comments

48% drop in store visits in three years

"There were 34 billion visits to US stores in 2010. By 2013, that number had plummeted 48% to 17.6 billion, according to Elite Wealth Management. As consumers make more of their purchases online, the challenge of engaging consumers in store is accelerating the rise of ‘experiential shopping’." David Kelnar in a fascinating trend analysis on Medium. Are you surprised by the headline percentage? Clearly online purchases…

21/09/2016 2 Comments

OSS fire drills

"Thousands of bank staff are being subjected to cyber security "fire drills" to determine who opens malicious emails or fails to report suspicious computer activity, in a sign financial institutions are ramping up their defences to criminal attacks on their information technology systems." James Eyers on AFR.com. So banks have commenced running cyber-security fire drills (spear phishing and reporting suspicious activity). What a great concept! Like…

20/09/2016 No Comments

Just throw in one more thing

Today I'd like to share a mistake that I've made over and over again in my career. It's a mistake I'm constantly trying to rectify, and succeeding, but still failing. It's not just me either. Many of my OSS colleagues fall into the same trap, so there must be something in our nature that makes us hopeless at this. We always want to throw just one…

19/09/2016 No Comments

Orange testing ECOMP

Orange Testing AT&T’s Open Source ECOMP Platform for Building Software-Defined Network Capabilities. AT&T has published the following statement (see link above). Global operator Orange plans to test AT&T’s* platform for creating and managing a software-defined network. AT&T built this platform, called ECOMP, with a focus on making it accessible to other operators and cloud developers. AT&T has committed to releasing ECOMP as open source software in…

18/09/2016 No Comments

Amdocs acquires three companies for $260M

Amdocs Acquires Three Leading Technology Companies to Expand Digital Offering. Amdocs announced it has closed the acquisition of three privately owned companies – Vindicia, Brite:Bill and Pontis – in line with the company's digital strategy. "Communication and media service providers, including those with over-the-top offerings, are transforming to capture the world of on-demand services and digital immediacy. When combined with business-driven analytics behind the scenes, this…

16/09/2016 No Comments

Data doesn’t talk…

... but it does answer questions. Earlier this week we discussed the fairly obvious structural shift towards customer-centricity. The telco industry is certainly riding this wave. The big telcos that I've worked with have certainly picked up their surfboards, but still don't necessarily know their customers as well as they could. They know the WHAT: - what services their customers are buying - which service mix…

16/09/2016 No Comments

Dell’s direct OSS sales model

Dell sells directly to its customers, avoiding the markups of intermediaries. Dell once diverged from this model, selling through agents, but failed and quickly reverted. The OSS market is quite clearly different from Dell's PC and laptop market, with vastly different customer volumes and revenue per customer. However, there are some OSS companies that have made the direct and online sales model work very well for…

15/09/2016 No Comments

Do you want to get a read on the OSS market?

Most of you would have noticed a significant structural shift in the last few years towards customer advocacy and listening to the customer far more closely, not just in OSS but across most industries. This introduces some interesting contrasts though. In any given year most OSS engineers, despite being genba staff, don't get the opportunity to get close to many customers and hence aren't able to…

14/09/2016 No Comments

Google to buy Apigee for $625 Million

Google to Buy Apigee for $625 Million to Expand Enterprise. Google is buying software development toolmaker Apigee Corp. for $625 million, the latest move by the search giant to bulk up its cloud-based offerings for businesses. Alphabet Inc.’s Google has agreed to pay $17.40 a share in cash, San Jose, California-based Apigee said in a statement Thursday. That’s a 6.5 percent premium to Apigee’s closing price…

13/09/2016 No Comments

Delusions of OSS

"“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement; nothing can be done without hope,” Helen Keller wrote in her 1903 treatise on optimism. But a positive outlook, it turns out, isn’t merely an intellectual disposition we don — it’s a deep-seated component of our evolutionary wiring and the product of powerful, necessary delusions our mind is working around-the-clock to maintain. At the root of that mental…

12/09/2016 No Comments

Redknee extends with Afghan Wireless

Redknee Secures an Expanded Software and Services Contract With Afghan Wireless. Redknee Solutions has secured a new multi-year software and services contract with Afghan Wireless Communication Company (AWCC), the leading telecom operator in Afghanistan. The new contract enables AWCC to maximize the value of its investment in Redknee’s software solutions by adding capabilities to the existing Redknee solution. This contract allows AWCC to offer innovative subscriber…

10/09/2016 No Comments

Seaborn Networks selects Amdocs

Seaborn Networks Selects Amdocs Optima to Monetize its Submarine Cable Infrastructure. Amdocs announced that Seaborn Networks, a developer and operator of submarine fiber optic cable systems, will deploy Amdocs Optima to rapidly and securely monetize its submarine cable infrastructure connecting the US and Brazil. Amdocs Optima, announced today, is a new cloud-based digital customer management and commerce platform for managing the entire cycle of customer relationships,…

09/09/2016 No Comments

VimpelCom partners with Ericsson for Digital Transformation

VimpelCom Group is partnering with Ericsson as the single provider for its OSS/BSS transformation across eleven of its operators. Ove Vik, Head of Digital transformation at VimpelCom Group, shares how his company’s digital transformation includes building a completely new environment, from the front end and user interfaces, through all of the core functionalities of the OSS/BSS. Ericsson will provide this as one environment, with an end-to-end…

09/09/2016 No Comments

Huawei claims improved management of SDN Networks

Huawei Claims to Improve O&M Efficiency of SDN Networks. At Huawei Connect 2016 in Shanghai, Huawei announced the launch of its updated Cloud Fabric 5.0 system for cloud services. It now has a Huawei Fabric Insight Refined Operations and Maintenance (O&M) system as its core. The O&M system locates faults through visualized network status measurement and management, including big data-based analysis, enabling customers to improve O&M…

08/09/2016 No Comments

Managing automations

"Making the business case for NFV isn't difficult in one sense; we already know that the only thing that can really drive NFV from its current point to early success is operations cost reduction through service automation. The problem for vendors is that only seven or eight vendors can actually provide the essential tools. You have to automate services from top to bottom, end to end,…