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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

Incident playback

There's an interesting thing about incidents, once they're resolved they no longer need attention, especially not attention on how they might be resolved better in future. But there's something of the special snowflake about incidents - they're all just a little bit different or unique and need their own special attention. [I'm not talking about the "noise" incidents like flapping ports here of course]. With every…

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26/01/2016 No Comments

Vicious cycle

Let's have a look at how OSS stands today in the eyes of the customers that invest in them: The pieces don't work together well Too expensive Too risky Too time consuming Consume too many resources Compromised outcomes - Don't give us what we need Then look at it from the perspective of vendors / integrators: Too few customers Too many varied needs Too little margin…

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25/01/2016 No Comments

MTN chooses ItsOn

MTN Group chooses ItsOn. ItsOn announced that it has signed a group agreement with MTN Group, Africa's largest mobile operator with more than 230 million customers throughout Africa and the Middle East. MTN will use ItsOn's cloud-based solution to increase subscribers and revenue by selling both enhanced mobile connection services and new digital content through a personalized and affordable on-device commerce experience. ItsOn's platform virtualizes and…

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23/01/2016 No Comments

Four carriers breaking away

"China Mobile, Tata, NTT, and Telefónica are creating open source groups to work on their own versions of management and orchestration (MANO) within ETSI’s network functions virtualization (NFV) framework." SDX Central. Interesting news from SDX Central that these four organisations are breaking away from the theoretical development of MANO and looking to push things along in its implementation. Telefonica's OpenMANO open-source project has been underway for…

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22/01/2016 No Comments

With knowledge comes power

“You’ve got Amazon knowing everything about purchasing, Google knowing everything about what people do on the Internet, and Salesforce knowing everything about the revenue side of a business.” Scott Raney. The big question for CSPs as they make the transition to the more modern Digital Service Provider (DSP) business models is, "what big thing can they know everything about and use to help their customers be…

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21/01/2016 No Comments

CSG expands with WIND Mobile

CSG Expands Relationship with Canada’s WIND Mobile. CSG International (NASDAQ: CSGS) announced that WIND Mobile, Canada’s fourth largest carrier, will add Singleview Commerce Engine to its existing CSG revenue management solutions. The addition of this solution will enable WIND to leverage a single platform to offer pre-paid and post-paid payment models as well as real-time rating and charging, enabling true service convergence across all offered services.…

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21/01/2016 No Comments

VSD, PPT, XLS

Question for you: Do your OSS users also use ubiquitous tools like Visio, PowerPoint, Excel and others to help perform their day-to-day workflows? I have two contrasting views on this: POSITIVE: They have carefully specified their needs and they 're rightly using the OSS only to do the most important / efficient tasks, using swivel-chairing to ensure simplicity at all levels of the OSS; or NEGATIVE:…

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20/01/2016 2 Comments

Toy Story

I'm currently reading the book, "Creativity, Inc" by Ed Catmull, the CEO of Pixar, the company famous for creating animated films like Toy Story, Cars, Monsters Inc, etc. Perhaps you've heard of them? For me, animated movies are a fascinating blend of technology and art. For almost every customer of Pixar's work, the technology is irrelevant, a means to an end - where the end is…

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19/01/2016 No Comments

More things gone wrong

Whoa! What an awful week. Last Monday, l promised to write a follow up post to "Things gone wrong" the next day. Well, that clearly didn't happen, true to form, due to something going wrong. If you plan on taking gastro for a test-drive like l did, I'd strongly recommend against it. :) Anyway, back to the follow-up post that continues to drow parallels to how…

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18/01/2016 No Comments

ETSI harmonises NFV information modelling

ETSI Seeks Harmonization of NFV Information Modelling. ETSI’s Industry Specification Group for Network Functions Virtualisation (ETSI NFV) convened a ground-breaking industry workshop to align cloud-centric initiatives and network-centric initiatives to ensure successful realization of NFV through automation. The workshop brought together the leading Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) and Open Source communities in an ‘NFV Village’. The workshop was hosted by CableLabs at their Louisville, Colorado (USA)…

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15/01/2016 No Comments

O2 extends Netcracker partnership

O2 in the UK Extends Netcracker Hosted Managed Services Partnership to Enable Nationwide M2M Initiative and Partner Revenue Share Ecosystem. Netcracker announced that Telefónica UK, which operates as O2 in the UK, has agreed to extend the use of Netcracker’s Revenue Management solution through a hosted managed services model for two new significant initiatives. By using Netcracker’s Revenue Management solution and Hosted Managed Services, O2 will…

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14/01/2016 No Comments

CenturyLink consolidates on Amdocs

CenturyLink to consolidate ordering, billing across its markets. CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) is moving to consolidate its local service ordering and billing systems so it can streamline its process and systems across its markets for wholesale CLEC customers. The telco currently operates two ordering and billing systems for its local services products, a product of the various acquisitions it has made over the past two decades, including…

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13/01/2016 No Comments