"If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away." Linus Pauling. I love this quote from Linus Pauling. I see it as an Engineer's equivalent of a sales funnel. The more ideas (leads) you stuff into the top of the funnel, the more likely you'll…
Read More »"The explosion of unstructured machine-generated from logs, sensors, networks and devices over the past few years has led to an exponential increase in data volume. Furthermore, the increase has been happening in parallel with a thirst for real-time Big Data applications. Enterprises simply want to extract greater value from their real-time Big Data asset. However, applications based on the traditional store-first, process-second data management architectures are…
Read More »"Essential: Document with just barely good enough detail. Valuable: Document only when we actually need it, not when we want it. Timely: Documentation should be done in a just-in-time (JIT) manner, when we need it." Ashish Sharma, here The Manifesto for Agile Software Development values "working software over comprehensive documentation". This ethos is particularly relevant for OSS projects. A document exists to communicate in ways that…
Read More »Comptel Receives Order From POST Technologies. Comptel has received a major order from POST Technologies in Luxembourg. This 3 year contract is a continuation of the long customer relationship that already exists since 1996. The deal amounting to 2.4 million euros comprises Fulfillment software licenses and services. “We are really pleased to expand our customer relationship with POST Technologies in Luxembourg. It is great to be…
Read More »Telefónica NFV reference lab releases OpenMANO NFV orchestration stack. Telefónica has released its OpenMANO NFV orchestration stack to open source community of developers through GitHub portal. OpenMANO is an open source project that provides a practical realization of the Management and Orchestration reference architecture (NFV MANO), currently under ETSI’s NFV ISG standardization. Today, the stack has become a key component in Telefónica’s NFV Reference Lab, being…
Read More »Ericsson closes acquisition of Canada-based TimelessMIND Ericsson announced the completion of its acquisition of TimelessMind, a Canada-based consulting and systems integration company specializing in operations and business support (OSS/BSS). The closing follows the announcement on February 20, 2015, that Ericsson entered into an agreement to acquire the assets of TimelessMIND. Paolo Colella, Vice President and Head of Consulting and Systems Integration at Ericsson, says: With TimelessMind…
Read More »InfoVista Acquires Ipanema Technologies to Maximize Business Application Experience. InfoVista announced it has acquired Ipanema Technologies. Ipanema delivers automated solutions to guarantee application performance across enterprises’ large and complex networks. For the fifth consecutive year, Ipanema has been positioned as a Visionary in Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimization”. The company’s solutions are used by more than 700 global enterprises and have been adopted by Tier-1…
Read More »"We see customers as invited guests for a party and we are the hosts. It is our job every day to make every aspect of the customer experience a little bit better." Jeff Bezos. An earlier post discussed value chains and the newer paradigm of value fabrics. Another post indicated how the value fabric can be used by CSPs to deliver services to customers without needing…
Read More »América Móvil Selects NEC and NetCracker to Lead OSS Consolidation and Transformation Across All LATAM Operators. NEC Corporation and NetCracker Technology announced today that they were selected to provide a consolidated, end-to-end OSS solution for all of América Móvil’s (AMX) Latin American operators. This program will include AMX operators in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico and deploy an international long-distance network across…
Read More »Accenture and Alcatel-Lucent Helping Telefonica Enhance Experience For Consumers in Europe and Latin America. Accenture and Alcatel-Lucent have announced a four-year agreement with Telefonica to deploy Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive Customer Experience Management software for Telefonica’s residential customers in European and Latin American countries. As a result, customers will gain more control over their broadband experience, including self-help tools to reduce calls to customer care and shorten resolution…
Read More »"Security experts are such a cheery lot. They’ll usually tell you you’re doing everything wrong and that we’re all doomed." Craig Matsumoto in an article here. I don't profess to be a network security expert, but I can't help but thinking that network virtualisation will bring security and OSS experts far closer together than ever before. I can envisage a merging of the NOC (Network Operations…
Read More »"The Biblical world view sees Earth and its ecosystems as the effect of a wise God's creation and... therefore robust, resilient, and self-regulating, like the product of any good engineer." Christopher Monckton. Yesterday's post highlighted Jon Parrish's five questions for establishing uniqueness of a product. It also spoke of the fragmentation of the OSS market and the diversity of customer needs being an instigator in that…
Read More »"I now live by the rule of “Goo-diligence.” Whenever have a new idea or am asked for feedback on someone else’s, I won’t move forward without a quick search on Google. I hate to say it, but many of my “great ideas” have stopped before they ever started because of things I’ve found in less than five minutes. On the other hand, this research period has…
Read More »"OpenStack Networking (Neutron) is the focus of development for a full software-defined networking stack. However, many organizations still use nova-networking in production, even though development on the networking code that is part of Compute will be deprecated in a future release. More and more, organizations are at a point of decision with their cloud and would like to migrate to Neutron... Li Chengyuan, Cloud Engineer at…
Read More »Plusnet Selects NetCracker for Next-Generation Billing Transformation. NetCracker Technology announced that Plusnet has selected NetCracker to transform its rating and billing infrastructure. NetCracker delivered its comprehensive Revenue Management solution to support Plusnet in continually addressing industry changes and enhancing end-to-end customer billing, rating and charging operations. Plusnet is an award-winning provider of low-cost broadband and home phone services to residential and business customers across the U.K.…
Read More »Comptel Has Won Significant Deal with New Telefonica Group Customer in South America. Comptel Has Won Significant Deal with New Telefonica Group Customer in South America. The FlowOne Fulfillment deal is a continuation of Comptel's good relationship with and expansion in the Telefonica group. The order value is approximately 1.3 million EUR, comprising Comptel Provisioning and Activation SoftBlade - which is part of the FlowOne Fulfillment suite…
Read More »IBM to invest $3B in building Internet of Things business. IBM on Tuesday said that it will create a new Internet of Things unit and invest $3 billion over four years to build it out. The move formalizes IBM's existing Internet of Things efforts. IBM's smarter-planet and smarter-cities businesses are connected to the Internet of Things trend. The rough idea behind the Internet of Things is…
Read More »Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Embrane. The following is quoted from Cisco's blog site (link above) "With agility and automation as persistent drivers for IT teams, the need to simplify application deployment and build the cloud is crucial for the data center. Cisco announced its intent to acquire Embrane, a provider of a lifecycle management platform for application-centric network services. As we continue to drive virtualization…
Read More »"The purpose of this white paper is to identify the essential Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) and management capabilities necessary to achieve the key aims of the MEF’s Third Network1. These capabilities will allow the Third Network not only to dramatically decrease the time to establish or modify the characteristics of the end-to-end service, but will also assure the overall service quality and security for these services.…
Read More »Brazilian Operator Selects CSG’s Mediation Solution. CSG International announced a new contract in Brazil for CSG’s award-winning Intermediate solution. With this latest contract, CSG Intermediate now supports the operations of 4 of the 5 leading mobile providers in Brazil. CSG will provide centralized data management across the company’s business operations. Known for its high average revenue per user (ARPU) as well as its low rate of…
Read More »"What the early adopter is buying, is some kind of change agent. By being the first to implement this change in their industry, the early adopters expect to get a jump on the competition, whether from lower product costs, faster time to market, more complete customer service, or some other comparable business advantage. They expect a radical discontinuity between the old ways and the new, and…
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