Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

Extending the OSS value chain

"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…

10/08/2016 No Comments

The danger of shortening time-to-market

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…

09/08/2016 2 Comments

How is OSS a strategic priority for telco execs

"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…

08/08/2016 No Comments

NEC and Netcracker provide vLTE to ITRI in Taiwan

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…

06/08/2016 No Comments

Indosat Ooredoo signs with Fortumo

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…

06/08/2016 No Comments

Contingency planning in real-time

"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…

05/08/2016 No Comments

TM Forum Open APIs

"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…

04/08/2016 2 Comments

The network must at least break even

"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…

03/08/2016 No Comments

Digital innovation practices

"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,…

02/08/2016 No Comments

Redknee selected by Tbaytel

Redknee Selected to Monetize Tbaytel’s Multi-Play Services and Support its Digital Transformation. Redknee Solutions Inc. announced the signing of a new multi-million dollar digital transformation contract with Tbaytel, the largest independently owned telecommunications service provider in Canada. This win will leverage Redknee’s experience in managing and implementing complex IT transformation projects to modernize Tbaytel’s business support systems. The Redknee solution will consolidate Tbaytel’s existing multi-play service…

02/08/2016 No Comments

The small-grid OSS platform

"Perhaps the most egregious platform failure is to simply not see the platform play at all. It is also one of the hardest for traditional firms to avoid. Firms guilty of this oversight never get past the idea that they sell products when they could be building ecosystems. Sony, Hewlett Packard (HP), and Garmin all made the mistake of emphasizing products over platforms. Before the iPhone…

01/08/2016 No Comments

Sprint and Ericsson renew partnership

Sprint and Ericsson renew portions of managed services partnership. Ericsson and Sprint announced a renewal of portions of the companies' 2009 managed services contract, which reaches its full term in September 2016. Going forward Ericsson will continue to be a key business partner for Sprint. As part of the new relationship Ericsson will provide some multi-vendor services that support the ongoing operations, development and transformation of…

29/07/2016 No Comments

Small-grids rely on APIs

"The telco’s strategy encompasses three broad categories of APIs, each of which targets a different audience: - Private, internal APIs accessible exclusively to Telstra’s developers; - External, public APIs, that are available for use by third-party developers; and - APIs intended for use by Telstra’s partners. “Each one of these has a different value to Telstra,” said Telstra developer evangelist Frank Arrigo. “The internal ones, the…

28/07/2016 No Comments

AT&T and Amdocs collaborate on Open Software Solution

AT&T and Amdocs Collaborate to Deliver Open Software Solutions to Accelerate Network Function Virtualization. Amdocs will be the integrator for telecommunications companies and cloud developers who want to use AT&T’s ECOMP platform to build their own software-centric network services. AT&T created and developed ECOMP and recently committed to releasing that code into open source. Amdocs will help companies deploy that open source software into their own…

28/07/2016 2 Comments

Ericsson and China Telecom sign MoU on IoT

Ericsson and China Telecom sign MoU on IoT. Ericsson and China Telecom group (China Telecom) signed a MoU to jointly build global Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity and offer one-stop global IoT connectivity service to enterprise customers through Ericsson Device Connection Platform (DCP). The MoU was signed at the China Telecom Tianyi Terminal Expo on July 15. According to the MoU, the partnership, initially covering a…

28/07/2016 No Comments

Leading questions for change

"Answers to leading questions under torture naturally tell us nothing about the beliefs of the accused; but they are good evidence for the beliefs of the accusers." C.S. Lewis. Today I'd like to share a clever strategy used by a clever OSS division head that l once worked with. The team he led was in the early stages of its development, but with an existing culture…

27/07/2016 No Comments

Reading the OSS instructions

"Yes, it's true, almost no one reads the instructions... people are so self-absorbed and hurried that they plunge first. One more reason to build something simple. But at least you can post instructions so that after they fail the first time, they have a shot at getting it right the second time." Seth Godin. My washing machine broke down last week. One little part plus labour was…

26/07/2016 No Comments

HT Croatia upgrades with Redknee

HT Croatia, part of DT Group, Positioned for Growth with Redknee Unified Upgrade. Redknee Solutions Inc. announced the completion of an upgrade project at Hrvatski Telecom (HT Croatia), part of the Deutsche Telekom Group. The Redknee Unified upgrade modernizes HT Croatia’s real-time charging system to provide agile capabilities to subscribers, while supporting future growth opportunities, the introduction of new and innovative services and real-time marketing campaigns.…

26/07/2016 No Comments

Hyper-expanding test cases

In the law of cascading problems, let's say we have data sets where our data accuracy levels are as follows: Locations are 90% Pits are 95% Ducts are 90% Cables are 90% Joints are 85% Patch panels are 85% Active devices are 95% Cards are 95% Ports are 90% Bearer circuits are 85% That all sounds pretty promising doesn't it (we've all seen data sets that are…

22/07/2016 No Comments

Small-grid OSS business model

"Companies often see the disruptive forces affecting their industry. They frequently divert sufficient resources to participate in emerging markets. Their failure is usually an inability to truly embrace the new business models the disruptive change opens up. Kodak created a digital camera, invested in the technology, and even understood that photos would be shared online. Where they failed was in realizing that online photo sharing was…

21/07/2016 No Comments

Spectacular success – wrong conclusions

"Spectacular success doesn’t lead to deep introspection, which in turn leads to wrong conclusions. You see this all the time, right? Successful companies draw conclusions about how smart and good they are, and then a significant number of them fall off the cliff because they drew the wrong conclusions." Ed Catmull (of Pixar) here. The article above provides Ed Catmall's interesting take on how Pixar needs…

20/07/2016 No Comments

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