As you might have noticed, I'm passionate about OSS, what they can do now, what they can do in the future and how they can help organisations prosper in this highly digital era. But one of the things I notice when speaking with the vast number of people directly involved or touched by our industry is that so much of the commentary is negative. In this…
Read More »"More people will pay you money to help them achieve a monetary goal than will pay you to give them something pretty to look at." Web Teacher In recent posts we've explored OSS user interfaces and simpler interfaces in particular. But a pretty interface is only useful if helps a prospective client achieve a monetary goal (or avoid a monetary penalty). Billions of dollars have been…
Read More »"Whitespace, many times referred to as negative space, is the portion of a page left unmarked, the portion that is left blank, or the empty space in a page. In web design terms, it’s the space between graphics, columns, images, text, margins and other elements. It is the space left untouched in order to smooth things out and transform a page into something elegant. It is…
Read More »Results from the world’s first independent interoperability evaluation of NFVI (Network Function Virtualisation Infrastructure), carried out by NIA and EANTC, can be found here. It provides an interesting read. Vendors include Cisco, Juniper, Ciena, Fortniet, Nokia, Dell and more. Juniper's perspective on this testing can be found here.
Read More »"The utter complexity of huge, standardized software systems also explains the death of big software. Enormous whole-company projects are often beyond the capabilities of even the most experienced project and program managers – especially when there’s never 100% consensus about the need for such a draconian project in the first place. The cloud has also killed big software. Years ago, companies would implement huge ERP software…
Read More »Thought you might like this graphic from AnalysisMason. The opportunities in OSS / BSS have their own list of corresponding opportunities. You can find a few thoughts here.
Read More »L&T Technology Services partners with Redknee to deliver IoT architecture for enterprises in transport, energy and insurance. L&T Technology Services Limited (“L&T Technology Services”), announced its collaboration with Redknee Solutions Inc, a leading provider of real-time monetization solutions. The alliance will offer our clients a complete architecture for enterprises to enable connectivity, analytics and monetization for the Internet of Things (“IoT”). Over the coming decade, the…
Read More »"Humans can speak 150 vs. type 40 words per minute, on average.." Kleiner Perkins' Internet Trends 2016. The latest Mary Meeker report (ie the link above) provides some interesting insights, as usual. One of them is the reference to voice becoming a much more significant computing interaction mechanism - evolving from keyboards to microphones and keyboards (see slides 115 on) with a 3.5x speed increase. It…
Read More »Nokia launches new IMPACT platform for fast and secure delivery of IoT services. Nokia is extending its device management leadership into IoT with the launch of the Intelligent Management Platform for All Connected Things (IMPACT), which gives operators, enterprises and governments a secure platform on which to scale new IoT services. IMPACT handles data collection, event processing, device management, data contextualization, data analytics, end-to-end security and…
Read More »"For IoT networks to become truly scalable, and not be dependent on a centralized cloud / management platform, decentralization of trust has to occur... and that's the picture of blockchain! Any decentralized IoT solution should support three foundational types of transactions: - Trustless peer-to-peer messaging - Secure distributed data sharing - A robust and scalable form of device coordination. With those three capabilities, the devices with…
Read More »VimpelCom and Ericsson enter software partnership worth over USD 1 billion. VimpelCom Ltd. , the international communications and technology company that is committed to bringing the digital world to each and every customer, announced that it has entered into a software partnership with Ericsson, in a deal worth more than USD 1 billion that will radically transform VimpelCom's global IT infrastructure. The partnership encompasses a complete…
Read More »"We’re an industry that still has overwhelming demand for what we do. We’re right at the core of this digital ecosystem; we’re in an amazing position. We enable the digital world to really happen, so without understating the issues we have – the value chain issues we have, the disruption we face – we should be proud of the industry we work in. This world becomes…
Read More »Last week we ran a series of blogs about what the OSS of the future is going to look like. It's going to be simple, not cluttered. It's going to provide answers, not just reams of information. It's going to allow operators to throw questions at it, in natural speech. It may even provide you with answers to questions you hadn't even thought to ask it.…
Read More »The picture you see below is of a coin minted by Roman Emperor Titus. It is the visualisation of the oxymoron of Festina Lente, or hasten slowly, where dolphins were known for their speed and the anchor for its stability. In terms of OSS, this is mirrored in the dichotomy of the speed of change versus the attention to detail and quality that they must produce.…
Read More »Here's a great article from Linux.com about container networks and network managers that our OSS will be interfacing with increasingly in the future.
Read More »Just thinking about yesterday's blog (about how OSS will become Whole of Business Support Systems and what impact that will have on the UI) when something quite simple dawned on me... In most cases, OSS should be designed to provide answers, not just information. But in most cases today, the opposite is true. We have user interfaces that show truckloads of information (as per the tongue-in-cheek…
Read More »In yesterday's blog, we discussed how the OSS of the future will not just be Operational support systems, instead being Whole of Business support systems (WOBSS?? :)). Anyway, we also discussed that to be relevant to the whole of business, our tools will need to provide: A context that is relevant to the operator (who might use the terminology of sales, contact centre, accounting, etc) because…
Read More »"So if an OSS is the glue that allows a modern digital business to communicate, derive cross-department insights and deliver operational efficiencies, does having the "Operational" in OSS actually constrain our thinking into what our tools can actually be... MUST actually be?" Friday's PAOSS post. So if the statement above is true, and we are to evangelise OSS as being able to add value beyond the…
Read More »Last week we discussed whether big OSS was losing relevance and our tools are just operational support systems (little oss). I firmly believe that the future for OSS, a future that already exists in some organisations, is for OSS to produce relevant insights and efficiency far beyond just operational teams. They need to be relevant to an organisations' business units that look after sales, marketing, products,…
Read More »"My initial reaction to the idea that continuous improvement begets enduring success was ‘makes sense, companies need to reinvent themselves if they want to stay on top for multiple decades and continuous improvement will do that for you’, but that underplays the importance of the point. An insatiable desire for everything to be the best it can be is key to getting to the top, not…
Read More »"Smart contracts are computer protocols that facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract, or that make a contractual clause unnecessary. Smart contracts usually also have a user interface and often emulate the logic of contractual clauses. Proponents of smart contracts claim that many kinds of contractual clauses may thus be made partially or fully self-executing, self-enforcing, or both. Smart contracts aim to…
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