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SolarWinds completes $4.5B sale

SolarWinds completes $4.5B sale. On Friday morning Austin software maker SolarWinds Inc. quietly completed its $4.5 billion sale to two investment firms. Jason Ream, Solarwinds’ chief financial officer, said the day was business as usual for the 17-year-old company, with only an internal email announcement sent out notifiying employees the deal had closed. In October, Silver Lake Partners and Thoma Bravo announced plans to take SolarWinds…

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15/02/2016 No Comments

Smart city OSS

A great friend of mine, Evan, and I recently caught up with Mike Lawrey, the Chairman of the TM Forum. Mike spoke to us about some interesting initiatives the TM Forum has in the pipeline, including some that build upon the success of their Smart City Forum. You may have noticed that I regularly discuss the future of OSS spreading from operations into digital ecosystems. I…

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15/02/2016 No Comments

OSS pyramid scheme

Most pyramid schemes have a bad name, but I have one for you today that is actually helpful to all involved. As we know, (almost) every organisation in the OSS industry is constrained by a shortage of talented resources that know the organisation's specific solution intimately. In some cases, the shortage leaves individuals as single points of knowledge and single points of failure. This is not…

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12/02/2016 No Comments

Planning – A tough challenge

After years of seeing OSS products, there's one set of functionality that tends to be highly desired by customers but rarely offered (well) by vendors. This tells me that it is very difficult to implement, and having also worked with vendors, I can attest to the challenge faced. The functionality set I'm talking about relates to network planning, being able to store multiple overlapping or cross-dependant…

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11/02/2016 2 Comments

Nokia launches AVA

Nokia AVA, the new cloud-based cognitive platform for service delivery to operators. Nokia has created a new way to develop and deliver expert services to operators seeking near-perfect network performance and availability, improved operational efficiency and thus a superior customer experience. Nokia AVA is a cloud-based platform that combines big data storage, intelligent analytics and extreme automation, allowing operators to move away from traditional reactive network…

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10/02/2016 No Comments

The reverse release

“To attain knowledge, add things everyday. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.” Lao Tzu. There's an interesting phenomenon in OSS, but probably software development in general, keep adding new features without giving a thought to removing any. This is fine if you're in a growth phase in terms of resources, budgets / revenues, customers, etc. But if you have already settled into a roughly balanced…

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10/02/2016 No Comments

Bright House Networks deploys Netcracker CRM

Bright House Networks Deploys Netcracker CRM Solution to Enhance Customer Experience and Deliver Greater Personalization. Netcracker announced that Bright House Networks has deployed Netcracker’s eCommerce and CRM solutions to enhance the customer experience and deliver greater personalization through more effective and automated customer engagements. As the sixth-largest cable MSO in the United States, Bright House Networks is providing simplicity and personalization with an eCommerce platform that…

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10/02/2016 No Comments

Virtual satellites

Last Friday the post, "Managing satellites," discussed how the satellite OSS concept provides core OSS to work on Telco networks / eTOM models, whereas ITIL / ITSM has become increasingly prevalent for the tools to help service managed service contracts. Does this concept resonate with you regarding management of virtualised networks in terms of satellites for the virtualised components and Core for the more physical activity…

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09/02/2016 No Comments

The signal in the noise

In our life and our OSS we're now bombarded with so much info that it can be overwhelming. We have to understand what really matters to know how to set up the right filters. Have you ever noticed how life in OSS, just like our email inboxes, is an endless stream of activities with a never-ending set of urgent tasks that need to be completed? But…

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08/02/2016 No Comments

Managing satellites

Douglas Stevenson made some great comments on a recent post called, "Managing managed services." He rightly pointed out that a carrier that builds custom OSS to support each managed service contract is losing sight of what really matters - they're delivering the tools rather than the services. Precisely! It made me consider this follow-up post to provide a little more commentary and thought around the concept.…

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05/02/2016 No Comments

Courageous decisions

In many posts (including this one) I have talked about the need for us as an industry to look beyond the current catch-cries of "differentiation" in OSS proposals: Cost-out More functionality It's easy to make such bold encouragement in a blog where there are no ramifications for stepping outside the norm. Much harder when actually in charge of a company, business unit or account worth multiple…

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04/02/2016 No Comments

Microsoft Azure IoT Hub launched

Microsoft Azure IoT Hub launched. The highly anticipated Microsoft Azure IoT Hub will be generally available on February 4. Azure IoT Hub provides an easy and secure way to connect, provision and manage billions of IoT devices sending and receiving trillions of messages per month. IoT Hub is the bridge between customers’ devices and their solutions in the cloud, allowing them to store, analyze and act…

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04/02/2016 No Comments

Amdocs makes five announcements

Amdocs has made the following five announcements in a day. TELUS Modernizes with Amdocs Billing and Charging Solution, Resulting in Optimized Processes and Greater Agility Crnogorski Telekom Deploys Amdocs Software for Pre- and Post-Paid Customer Management, Ordering and Billing Globe Telecom G-Xchange, Inc. Enhances GCash Services with Latest Amdocs Mobile Financial Services Solution Amdocs Solution Helps Liberty Global Launch MVNO Operations in Austria and Ireland Amdocs…

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04/02/2016 No Comments

Managing managed services

Managed services contracts are a big source of revenue for many big telcos. There are many variants on what a managed service is but l'll loosely define it here as a contract between a service provider and an organisation where the organisation delegates some responsibility for running their communication network to the CSP. It could be for managing telephony, LAN, WAN, etc on behalf of the…

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03/02/2016 2 Comments

Winner takes all

"On Monday this week taxi app Lyft raising a new $1bn round which included $500m from General Motors. Twelve months ago the received wisdom was that Uber was on a tear and it’s competitors would fail and in response to this  funding news LA Times wrote a piece questioning whether the ‘winner takes all phenomenon’ that characterises so much of the internet doesn’t apply in transportation. I’m…

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02/02/2016 No Comments

Root cause rule

Have you ever built a root-cause algorithm? Root cause is so dependent upon each individual network with all of its nuances so it's difficult to find one-size-fits-all methods. Individuals can develop the experience and can learn to read the signs and understand the linkages. Machine learning can too. One technique that I find transfers across networks is to build root cause algorithms around network hierarchy (if…

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01/02/2016 2 Comments

Incident play forward

Earlier this week you may have read, "Incident playback," a post about storing the context around incidents and being able to learn and refine responses using that context. Today I'd like to take the concept a little further. When talking about context, I wasn't just referring to other live alarms, but also having data feeds such as performance metrics (eg CPU utilisation), change windows (with linkages…

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29/01/2016 No Comments

ETSI group for Next Generation Protocols

ETSI creates new standardization group to pave the way for Next Generation Protocols. ETSI has opened a new Industry Specification Group to commence work on Next Generation Protocols, looking at evolving communications and networking protocols to provide the scale, security, mobility and ease of deployment required for the connected society of the 21st century. The first meeting of this group took place on 21 January 2016,…

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28/01/2016 No Comments

Managing content

Do end customers buy bandwidth off CSPs because they really want a data service? No? To deliver entertainment services; to deliver communications with friends, family and customers; to deliver learnIng; to facilitate shopping; to spread an organisation's selling messages across multiple channels and provide near-real-time response metrics on each; to build marketplaces; to deliver; to collaborate; to share; Yes? The services, content and applications that customers…

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28/01/2016 No Comments

CSG selected by Globalstar

CSG to Support Next Generation Satellite Services at Globalstar. CSG International (NASDAQ: CSGS) announced that Globalstar (NYSE MKT: GSAT), a leading international provider of mobile satellite voice and data services, has selected CSG as the revenue and customer management solution provider for its second-generation service launch in the first half of 2016. Globalstar's advanced second-generation satellite constellation and next-generation ground network will offer enhanced services for…

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28/01/2016 No Comments

The problem with virtual reality

In the past I've written about a cool tool called AugView that lets you augment what you see in front of you with a spatial representation of physical assets, such as conduits, cables, etc that are actually hidden underground. At the moment there are two limitations that restrict the usefulness of tools like AugView. The first is finding geo-positioning hardware (eg GPS units) that are accurate…

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27/01/2016 No Comments