Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

SmarTone Upgrades Netcracker

SmarTone Upgrades Netcracker Revenue Management Solution to Simplify Billing Operations. Netcracker Technology announced that it has been selected to upgrade and extend its relationship with SmarTone. As part of the agreement, Netcracker will upgrade its leading-edge Revenue Management solution and extend its Systems Integration and Professional Services arrangement with SmarTone. SmarTone is a leading telecommunications company operating out of Hong Kong and Macau. It provides voice,…

24/03/2016 No Comments

Cisco completes acquisition of Jasper

Cisco Completes Acquisition of Jasper to Accelerate Enterprise IoT. Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) has completed its $1.4B acquisition of Jasper, a privately held company based in Santa Clara, Calif. Jasper’s industry-leading cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) service platform enables companies of all sizes to rapidly and cost-effectively launch, manage and monetize IoT services on a global scale. Our Vision Together With the acquisition, Jasper forms the new IoT…

24/03/2016 No Comments

Looking to OSS’s flying cars

Earlier this week we discussed how Peter Thiel's statement, "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters," and how it related to the world of OSS. One of Peter's ventures is the Founders Fund, a venture capital firm investing in smart people solving the world's difficult problems. The Founders Fund Manifesto is an inspirational call-to-arms for anyone in the technology space, one that I'd highly recommend…

23/03/2016 No Comments

Customer-facing roles

Last Friday I posted an article on "OSS resilience" that mentioned the need for resilience on OSS projects and how to measure it in your new hires. It highlighted the need for resilience in "customer-facing roles" in particular but I immediately realised the misrepresentation within this statement. I'm sitting here wracking my brain but can't think of any role that isn't customer facing... it just depends…

22/03/2016 No Comments

We wanted flying cars

“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Peter Thiel. This meme speaks of the innovation occurring in the world of technology. It seems that we are making fewer major innovations (flying cars) compared with the world-changing innovations that are really only minor in terms of technological breakthroughs (like Twitter's 140 characters). When reading, "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American…

21/03/2016 4 Comments

OSS Resilience

"At the dinner before the Forward Partners board meeting in February we were talking about the characteristics we look for in entrepreneurs. I was going through my usual list – drive, discipline, charisma, intelligence, resilience etc. etc when one of our investors interrupted to ask how we assess resilience. He caught me out. We form our view on whether to back entrepreneurs by spending time with…

18/03/2016 No Comments

My six laws of data integrity

Data integrity law #1 - When being handled, the accuracy / integrity of a data set tends to degrade over time. Data integrity law #2 - To prevent rule #1 from making the data unusable, the data needs to be curated. Data integrity law #3 - Curating data always carries a cost. Data integrity law #4 - The more data and the more referential integrity (ie…

17/03/2016 2 Comments

Cost out, cost out, cost out

Those seem to be the three highest priorities for sponsors of OSS projects at the moment. In other words, that means improved efficiencies. Many translate this to requiring CAPEX projects that deliver new things (that in turn drive new efficiencies). This mindset is particularly true for the vendors who are trying to oust their competitors's products at any given customer. Since OSS are (or should be)…

16/03/2016 No Comments

It’s a fine line

This blog regularly discusses the need to simplify everything in OSS. However this runs contrary to the perspective of many integrators. From their perspective, the more complex, the more effort required, therefore the greater the income for them (albeit greater cost [and sometimes bitterness] from their customers). After all, services usually have higher margins than products so the higher the services to product ratio, the higher…

15/03/2016 2 Comments

Three enters into managed services contract with Amdocs

Three Ireland enters into five-year €65m managed services contract with Amdocs. Three announced that it has signed a contract worth €65m with Amdocs, the leading provider of customer experience solutions, for strategic services and solutions to support Three Ireland in its IT digital transformation, which includes the integration of former O2 IT systems, the elimination of duplicate IT costs and the delivery of a world-class customer…

12/03/2016 No Comments

Getting up to speed on OSS

"In five years a new employee is going to walk in for her first day, sit down in front of a screen (or HUD) and say, “Alexa, show me the org, how it’s changed in the last 6 months, how it works, and where I can help.” And then the screen (and her eyes) are going to light up." Aaron Dignan here. If I change just a couple…

10/03/2016 2 Comments

Open source OSS

"Last week, two new open source groups focusing on management and orchestration (MANO) of network functions virtualization (NFV) announced their existence: the Open Source Management (OSM) group hosted by ETSI, and Open-O hosted by the Linux Foundation. At the press conference announcing Open-O, Yang Zhiqiang, deputy general manager of the China Mobile Research Institute, said the operation support system (OSS) will lead to open source software…

09/03/2016 No Comments

Telcos spent all this money

"Telcos spent all this money, built all the infrastructure, hired all these clever people, imagined and planned and consulted for all of it, have all this market power, and they'll get none of it." Ben Evans talking about mobile Internet. Ben has a point. Telcos spent huge amounts of money building the infrastructure to support mobile Internet. They didn't get "none" of it exactly, but they did…

08/03/2016 No Comments

Critical OSS mass

The OSS market is segmented. That means its talent is too. The question I often ponder is how do we reach the critical mass of talent required to take OSS to its lofty potential? How do we get its virtuosos in a single place for months on end to solve its biggest problems (and there are many)? I assume the answer lies in providing the right…

07/03/2016 No Comments

Cisco unveils Digital Network Architecture

Cisco Unveils Digital Network Architecture to Accelerate Customer Digital Transformation. Digitization is transforming businesses in every industry, opening up a $2.1 trillion global market opportunity by 2019, according to IDC*. The path to digitization requires a digital network that evolves beyond just connectivity. This new network will enable business innovation, generate insights and create customer experiences. It will reduce cost and complexity with new orchestration and…

04/03/2016 No Comments

A shortage of feedback

Why do so many of the new buzz technologies, such as Internet of Things and analytics exist to provide faster / better feedback but OSS generally doesn't make more use of it? Sure, we provide dashboards and lists that provide customers with feedback, but are we using feedback enough to make our solutions better? We don't use enough of the feedback loops described here (I hope…

04/03/2016 No Comments

OSS steam engine time

"Steam engine time is a period of time when many inventors all over the world, despite isolation from each other, and with no contact with each other in any way, begin inventing a similar technology with a coincidental commonality of ideas." Urban Dictionary. Another perspective on steam engine time is a period where there are So many associated innovations happening that it is inevitable that a…

03/03/2016 No Comments

Doing one thing well

"Doing one thing well is hard. Doing more than one thing well at the same time is exponentially harder. Clarity and focus are what generate excellence. They bring the attention to detail, dedication and obsession which begets success. It’s impossible to be obsessed about more than one thing at the same time. If you believe, as I do, that excellence is the best path to success…

02/03/2016 No Comments

The bozo explosion

"A players hire A+ players.Actually, Steve believed that A players hire A players—that is people who are as good as they are. I refined this slightly—my theory is that A players hire people even better than themselves. It’s clear, though, that B players hire C players so they can feel superior to them, and C players hire D players. If you start hiring B players, expect…

01/03/2016 3 Comments

The IT vs Ops war

We've all seen and/or heard about the subtle (or unsubtle) war that goes on between operations (OT) and IT within many organisations. The "balance of power" often shifts depending on the relative skills (technical, persuasion, etc) within each of the teams. Convergence to IP (Internet Protocol) and concepts such as IoT (Internet of Things) are shifting the power base more heavily towards IT teams (to the…

29/02/2016 No Comments

Ericsson and MediaTek complete Wi-Fi calling testing

Ericsson and MediaTek complete Wi-Fi calling interoperability testing and by that expand the device ecosystem. Ericsson and Mediatek (a chipset vendor) support growing the Wi-Fi calling device eco-system with more commercial chipsets tested towards mobile networks. This grows the device ecosystem with more commercial Wi-Fi calling enabled smartphone brands and models for more markets. Operators in markets that do not have high penetration of high-end smartphones…

28/02/2016 No Comments

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