"...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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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,…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »“Global telecommunications study: navigating the road to 2020.” In the study listed above, executives at some of the world's largest CSPs indicate that the players most likely to disrupt their industry is OTT app providers. Any thoughts on why they might be perceived to be 30x more influential than technology specialists, or 5x more influential than cable/satellite operators? My take is that it's because OTT app…
Read More »I recently read this great scenario in a customer's requirements gathering guide and it can be related to the capturing of OSS requirements too. As a husband, I can also relate more directly to the scenario. ;) Wife says... I sent my husband grocery shopping for: Tomato paste Shampoo Apples Extra Virgin Olive Oil Milk Chocolate He comes back with: Tomato paste Shampoo Apples Extra Virgin…
Read More »On Friday we published The Simplification Mantra. It discussed the starting perspectives for simplification and that OSS already have so much functionality that they're difficult for users to navigate. An example that I see time and again is where OSS can achieve a requirement, let's say designing a service for one customer, but don't cater for delivering the functionality at scale (ie designing services for hundreds…
Read More »Crescendo Partners Sends Letter to Redknee Solutions Inc. Board of Directors. Crescendo Partners today announced that it has delivered a letter to the Board of Directors of Redknee Solutions Inc. In the letter, Crescendo Partners urges the Board to immediately commence a broad sale process for the entire Company. Crescendo believes that numerous potential buyers would be interested in acquiring Redknee because of its strong brand…
Read More »When it comes to designing, building and configuring OSS, there is a tendency to have a functionality delivery mindset. That is, if we can get our OSS to meet each functional requirement then we tick the box and move on to the next. There is usually a long list of requirements that need to be ticked off, so we don't have time to go through the…
Read More »Redknee Wins VoLTE Upgrade With Tier 1 Operator in Europe. Redknee Solutions Inc. announced that it has won a multi-million dollar contract to upgrade a major Tier 1 communication service provider (CSP) in Europe to the latest release of the Redknee Unified Application Server, part of Redknee’s monetization and subscriber management suite. Redknee Unified is deployed in the CSP’s virtualized data center and supports more than…
Read More »Network operators often talk about five-nines (ie 99.999% up-time on any given network device) as a measure of the reliability of their networks. However, I personally don't believe that many of the operators' customers would consider this as a measure of network quality. Five-nines is a metric that is widely cited from inside the walls of operators, partly because it sounds impressive but also because it…
Read More »"To avoid commoditization, telcos should become the focal point of the extended value chain, focusing on digital services and taking advantage of their traditional competencies." "Global telecommunications study: navigating the road to 2020." The graph above tells a story about the changing share of wallet (end-to-end value chain) in the telecommunications sector. The three dials to the left are the traditional end-to-end value chain for a…
Read More »Time-to-market is an important metric in the Telco vernacular. It's important because rapid TTM allows one CSP to get an attractive new product out to customers earlier than competitors and all the benefits that go with it (ie rapid revenue turn-on, market share, brand awareness, etc). One of the primary impediments to a product's TTM is the IT stream (including OSS, process / tech / contract…
Read More »"Global telecommunications study: navigating the road to 2020" It's interesting that "Improved IT Systems and Processes" is seen as a strategic priority by around a third of respondents to this executive study by EY. It also implies that improved IT systems and processes are probably only front-of-mind for investment for about one third of Telco executives. Do you know what I see in this graph? I…
Read More »NEC and Netcracker Provide Virtualized LTE Core Network to ITRI in Taiwan. NEC Corporation and Netcracker Technology announced that they have provided a virtualized Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) solution via NEC Taiwan Ltd. to the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), a non-profit research institute working under the Ministry of Economic Affairs in Taiwan. The NEC/Netcracker vEPC solution has a proven global track record of virtualizing network…
Read More »Indosat Ooredoo and Fortumo Launch Direct Carrier Billing in Indonesia. The mobile payments company Fortumo and Indonesia’s leading digital telco Indosat Ooredoo are today announcing the launch of direct carrier billing. The partnership will enable 69.8 million Indosat Ooredoo subscribers’ to make online payments by charging purchases to their mobile account, without the need to use a credit card. “We are pleased to build this strategic…
Read More »"Instead of asking: do we have enough capacity? telcos should be asking: when (and where) will we run out of capacity? And what are we doing to mitigate? Instead of simply reacting to outages, telcos should have a real time view of the current risk points, failure scenarios and their impacts - with recovery plans should the worst case failure happen." Robert Curran here. What a wonderful concept…
Read More »"Until now, communications service providers could not match their digital native counterparts when it came to delivering what customers want, when and where they want it. Now there is a real opportunity to close that gap through a number of interrelated, big trends that are happening in parallel. This includes transforming their infrastructure through network functions virtualization (NFV), software-defined networking (SDN) and cloud technologies, and transforming…
Read More »"I made the point that there was one rule that had to govern any operator shift of focus to higher service layers—the network itself must remain profitable. You can’t say you’ll earn new revenue that in part at least will subsidize a network loss, because competitors with no network and no losses will then have a pricing advantage you can’t make up. What higher-layer services could…
Read More »"Gartner’s 2016 CIO Survey revealed five key innovation practices that deliver the highest improvement in digital performance: Crowdsourcing, Different metrics, Formal innovation management and work with Startups. Nevertheless according to the same survey, CIOs also indicated that these five innovation were the least used." Sebastian Barros here. I suspect these CIO findings are also mirrored in the OSS industry. How many OSS organisations do you know that are making use of: Crowdsourcing,…
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