Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

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,…

08/09/2016 No Comments

ECOMP (Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management & Policy)

AT&T's ECOMP (Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management & Policy) Architecture White Paper can be found here. It provides a reference architecture and a breakdown of the components that AT&T are using to manage their virtualised network functions. It's an interesting take on MANO / OSS in a carrier environment, especially figure 3 that compares and contrasts ETSI's MANO architecture with ECOMP.

07/09/2016 No Comments

Captcha’ing OSS

You all know those captcha codes online to prove you're not a bot right (examples above)? They can be really obscure and annoying can't they? I contemplated adding captcha codes to the comments section under each blog to prevent the barrage of spam from overwhelming legitimate comments. That thought process didn't last long though - 1) I can use captcha codes and make my life easier,…

06/09/2016 No Comments

Diminishing OSS returns

The law of diminishing returns refer to a point at which the level of benefits gained is less than the amount of effort expended. In other words, reaching an asymptote of progressively less benefit for a given unit of effort. This is reflective of many jobs in the world, where their exponents quickly approach the asymptote of mastery. Not OSS though. An OSS maybe. Your OSS…

05/09/2016 3 Comments

Using deduction

"Eric Raymond proposed that a computer should 'never ask the user for any information that it can autodetect, copy, or deduce'; computer vision changes what the computer has to ask. So it's not, really, a camera, taking photos - it's more like an eye, that can see." Ben Evans here. There's a big buzzword going around our industry at the moment called "omnichannel." Consider it an…

02/09/2016 No Comments

Multiple persona disorder

It's almost time for our monthly OSS breakfast in Melbourne (last Wednesday of each month). Last month saw the attendance of the only UI / UX expert I know who also has OSS experience. It surprises me that there aren't more UI / UX / OSS experts out there, but I'm also not all that surprised if you know what I mean. As with most of…

29/08/2016 No Comments

OSS monkey mind

"Buddhists long ago observed what they call the “monkey mind”, the idea that the mind is inherently a bit restless and fidgety. If you don’t give it a clear task, it will either keep a running commentary, or wander off on tangents. Your head becomes filled with an endless, meandering chatter – a din that has been blamed for everything from anxiety to insomnia. The solution,…

26/08/2016 No Comments

Redknee wins Tier 1 contract in EMEA

Redknee Wins Multi-Million Dollar Contract To Enhance Customer Satisfaction for a Tier 1 CSP in EMEA. Redknee Solutions Inc. announced a multi-million contract to upgrade a Tier 1 communication service provider (CSP) in Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) to Redknee Unified 2016. The upgrade will support the creation of innovative real-time analytics-driven promotions and enable the CSP to deliver improved subscriber satisfaction and retention. This…

25/08/2016 No Comments

When phones swallowed physical objects

"...after a decade in which phones swallowed physical objects, with cameras, radios, music players and so on turned into apps, AR might turn those apps back into physical objects - virtual ones, of course. On one hand cameras digitise everything, and on the other AR puts things back into the world." Ben Evans here. Similarly, for years OSS have been like a black hole - sucking…

24/08/2016 No Comments

Netia extends with Netcracker

Netia Extends Revenue Management Partnership with Netcracker. Netcracker Technology announced that Netia, one of Poland’s largest telecommunications service providers, has extended its partnership for support and maintenance services. These capabilities will enable Netia to bring innovative offerings to the market faster and provide greater visibility into end-to-end billing and revenue management operations. The extension also means that Netia has the option to upgrade Netcracker’s Revenue Management…

24/08/2016 No Comments

IVR to OSS

Question for the community. Have any of you heard of (or experienced) a Telco using data out of their IVRs (Interactive Voice Response) solutions to link up with OSS data? There is a current trend to use merge social data sets to determine customer sentiment and potentially cross-reference against network health and other OSS/BSS data sets. With IVRs having the ability to convert speech to text,…

23/08/2016 4 Comments

Cisco to pivot to software

Cisco’s Robbins: We’ll transition our revenues to a software, subscription-based model. Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins is set on pivoting the routing giant toward becoming a software-based vendor, signaling its desire to satisfy customers like AT&T which is transitioning its network to software by the end of this decade. “We believe we will transition more of our revenues to a software and subscription based model and accelerate…

20/08/2016 No Comments

Sankey diagrams go with the flow

There can be many parts that make up an operator's provisioning factory. There can also be multiple different software packages that contribute towards getting an order through the factory. In addition to that, there are usually many different activities that need to take place, some automatic, some manual, some as external dependencies, conditional gates, etc. That's why operators design process maps and why most OSS have…

18/08/2016 No Comments

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