Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

Vertical or horizontal OSS branching?

"If you embrace special orders, you're doing something difficult, scarce and worth seeking out." Seth Godin here. Recent post, "Long Tail Dynamics in OSS," highlighted the different bands of customers that a CSP services and the different OSS that they use to service each band. The head (the top-X customers by revenue) tends to get customised OSS solutions, whilst the long tail (the other customers, many…

18/09/2015 No Comments

Show me your bookcase…

"Show me your bookcase, the ideas that you've collected one by one over the years, the changes you've made in the way you see the world. Not your browser history, but the books you were willing to buy and hold and read and store and share. Every bookshelf tells a story. You can't build one in a day or even a week... it's a lifetime of…

17/09/2015 No Comments

CableSouth Media3 extends with NetCracker

CableSouth Media3 Extends and Expands BSS Engagement with NetCracker. NetCracker Technology announced that it has extended and expanded its partnership with CableSouth Media3. NetCracker will continue to support CableSouth Media3’s use of the NetCracker Customer and Revenue Management solution through a hosted managed services model and implement a cutting-edge customer Web self-care application. CableSouth Media3 is a leading cable operator in the United States, delivering triple-play…

17/09/2015 No Comments

Long tail dynamics in OSS

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…

16/09/2015 No Comments

Who has the last laugh?

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…

15/09/2015 1 Comment

Segmentation of one (continued)

"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…

14/09/2015 No Comments

Liberty Global invests in Guavus

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…

13/09/2015 No Comments

Huawei launches OSS-as-a-Service

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…

13/09/2015 No Comments

Telefónica announces SDN/NFV PoC with NEC and NetCracker

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…

12/09/2015 No Comments

Econet Wireless Burundi signs with ZTE

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…

12/09/2015 No Comments

Segmentation of one

"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 -…

11/09/2015 No Comments

Huawei unveils Video Experience Measurement System

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…

11/09/2015 No Comments

OSS Bureau of Statistics

"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…

10/09/2015 No Comments

Can OSS be marketing tools?

"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.…

09/09/2015 No Comments

Managing network abundance

"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…

08/09/2015 No Comments

Practice adding value to people

"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…

07/09/2015 No Comments

Just one more bucket

"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…

04/09/2015 4 Comments

Only the Swedes can change Sweden

"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,…

03/09/2015 No Comments

C-Ports – Docker Containers Across Multiple Clouds

"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…

02/09/2015 No Comments

Ericsson signs with Cisco and Tektronix

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…