The diagram above shows the head and the long tail of OSS, but also the tale of two distinct ways of thinking at some Tier-1 CSPs. The yellow band represents the head, the top-X (eg Top 100) customers, generally the major corporates, government, etc that spend massive amounts on communication services and expect a corresponding amount of attention from the CSP, usually in the form of managed…
Read More »When I was at uni, there was a stall that had graffiti on the wall that was quite similar to the diagram above - words to the effect of "Arts degree - please take one." It showed the disdain that some students obviously felt for the worth of an arts degree. Back then, this sentiment was reflected in hiring policies of tech companies. But this interesting…
Read More »"By now, most people know who Google is and what Google does. Google serves billions of online users in this country and around the world … With little or no revenue from its users, Google still manages to turn a healthy profit by selling advertisements within its products that rely in substantial part on users’ personal identification information … in this model, the users are the…
Read More »Liberty Global Makes Strategic Investment in Guavus. Leading international cable company Liberty Global plc has made a strategic investment in Guavus, Inc., a provider of real-time big data analytics applications for operational intelligence. Built on the Guavus Reflex ® operational intelligence platform, Guavus products allow cable operators to gain a holistic, cohesive view of network state and business context in real-time. It uniquely breaks down the…
Read More »Huawei launches OSS-as-a-Service to unleash full value of OSS. Huawei has launched its new service-driven offering - OSS-as-a-Service. OSS-as-a-Service is designed to maximize return-on-investment and operation efficiency, increase service agility and unleash the full value of Operation Support System (OSS) for Communications Service Providers (CSPs). OSS-as-a-Service is a mix of business & delivery models for OSS capabilities in a Multi-Year Service Relationship. CSPs can find OSS-as-a-Service…
Read More »Telefónica Announces Successful Proof of Concept for SDN/NFV with NEC and NetCracker. NEC Corporation, NetCracker Technology and Telefónica Business Solutions have successfully completed a Proof of Concept (PoC) based on SDN/NFV that allows Telefónica to accelerate its strategy to automate operations and provide a new agile WAN on the business market. Telefónica, which won the award for “Operator of the Year” in the category of network…
Read More »ZTEsoft Partners with Econet Wireless Burundi for Consolidated Network Billing. ZTEsoft, a leading provider of telecom software, solutions and services, has announced a deal with Econet Wireless Burundi, the largest mobile operator in Burundi with more than 2.7 million subscribers. This will see the deployment of ZSmart cvBS V8.0 (convergent billing system) to support Econet Burundi’s consolidated network with U-COM/Leo. Econet Wireless is a diversified telecommunications…
Read More »"SMSes and push notifications have eight times higher response rates from consumers compared to emails. Thus, sending relevant and targeted push notifications would not only have higher response rates for the brand but also improve the shopping experience for the customer." Nameet Potnis. It's been a bit of a "marketing" week here on PAOSS. The theme continues today. That number above is a big one -…
Read More »Huawei Unveils Video Experience Measurement System U-vMOS. Huawei unveiled its video experience evaluation system, U-vMOS, at the Ultra-Broadband Forum (UBBF). The system measures indicators from sample analysis of subjective video experiences coupled with analysis from related technologies to provide objective assessments on the overall video service experience. It provides a unified standard to measure the user experience which guides operators and the video industry chain in…
Read More »"If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment [ed. unless it's a marketing experiment ;) ]." Ernest Rutherford. Assuming that yesterday's hypothesis was correct and many of a CSP's customers are looking for data to identify marketing opportunities, what valuable service can we make of that? Government-based Bureaus of Statistics (BoS) have long provided stats such as population, demographics, etc that…
Read More »"One of the messages at the keynote included the fact that successful busineses now have a ratio of 4:1 in the marketing and sales. This means that to maximize company growth and sales, successful companies engage about four marketing specialists to one sales person. The traditional role of the Business Development Manager or Sales Manager is a dying role that needs to be redefined or possible redesigned.…
Read More »"Abundance is not something we acquire. It is something we tune into." Wayne Dyer. Have you noticed that in many developed countries, CSP services have recently flipped from scarcity to abundance situations? Bandwidth, storage, compute, applications, content, etc all saw premiums in the past because demand outweighed restrictions in supply. But in recent times, this has flipped to an over-supply of associated products / services. And…
Read More »"As you move higher and higher in the world of success, more and more of your job becomes "people development." Ask, "What can I do to 'add value' to my subordinates [ed: or peers]? What can I do to help them become more effective?" Remember, to bring out the best in a person, you must first visualise his best." David Schwartz, in "The Magic of Thinking…
Read More »"Many drops make a bucket, many buckets make a pond, many ponds make a lake, and many lakes make an ocean." Percy Ross. One of the big OSS challenges for vendors and customers alike is version management. Let's say Customer X installs version 1.5.3 of Vendor Y's exciting new resource management software. This software is a central component of Customer X's best-of-breed OSS suite and there…
Read More »"Changing IBM is like trying to change Sweden, and it would require diplomatic and bureaucratic work." Edward Tufte. Interesting analogy from Edward Tufte. Give or take, IBM consists of around 400,000 employees globally (FWIW. Sweden has a population of around 9.5 million people). That's a lot of people to persuade towards a future mode of operation, so Edward's comment on Twitter is valid. But funnily enough,…
Read More »"C-Ports (pronounced seaports), as we call it, has already been demonstrated to effectively deploy containers across 5 clouds (Bluemix, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Chameleon , and FutureSystems and 2 clusters (one at IBM and another at Rutgers University) in order to create a dynamic federation. Additionally, C-Ports is not tied to a specific container scheduler, i.e., it can work with any local container scheduler, such as…
Read More »Ericsson signs OSSii license agreements with Cisco and NETSCOUT's Tektronix Communications. Ericsson has signed license agreements with both Cisco Systems and Tektronix Communications (a wholly owned subsidiary of NETSCOUT SYSTEMS, INC), under which Ericsson will license its OSS interfaces for integration with Cisco self-optimizing network (SON) products and Tektronix Communications TrueCall® geoanalytics platform. The agreement is in alignment with the principles outlined in the OSS Interoperability…
Read More »"...numbers from comScore showing that while 60 percent of retail browsing happens on mobile devices, those devices only account for 15 percent of dollars spent. “The experiences on mobile haven’t caught up with the consumer demand,” he said. “The consumer is ready to do commerce on mobile.”" Anthony Ha here on TechCrunch. These fascinating stats pose the questions: Do customers prefer to buy from PC or…
Read More »"It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be." Isaac Asimov. Last week I brought some of Tom Nolle's ideas to your attention in a blog about building blocks. The benefits of this ambitious,…
Read More »"All the scientist creates in a fact is the language in which he enunciates it. If he predicts a fact, he will employ this language, and for all those who can speak and understand it, his prediction is free from ambiguity.." Henri Poincaré. As an OSS consultant, I succeed or fail partly on my ability to create strategies, concepts and plans, but more importantly on my…
Read More »NEC and NetCracker Deliver Additional Solutions to Expand Maxcom’s End-to-End OSS Footprint. NEC Corporation, NetCracker Technology and NEC México announced that Maxcom, an integrated, quad-play communications provider in Mexico, has selected them to deliver additional NetCracker OSS solutions that will improve business agility, infrastructure deployment as well as inventory and network synchronization. Maxcom provides high-speed Internet, voice and pay-TV services to residential and business customers in…
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