"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…
Read More »"Do you think that such a role (a Chief Simplification Officer or Project Simplification Officer) is justified? If so, what do you think are the essential traits that this person would need?" I posed these questions in a recent article entitled, "Chief Simplification Officer," so rather than just leave you with an open question, today I'd like to give my views on what attributes might be…
Read More »"By seeking and blundering we learn." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In the grand scheme of OSS and all its constituent pieces, no one person knows very much at all. That's why we have to build learning (and teaching) into everything we do in OSS, as individuals, as organisations and as products. It's for this reason that I'm such a believer that analytics and learning management systems…
Read More »"What simple action could you take today to produce a new momentum toward success in your life?" Tony Robbins. Complexity is the single biggest challenge that stands in the way of us delivering OSS masterpieces. As described in, "The triple constraint of complexity," the reduction of any complexity should have a multiplier effect towards the success of the project. This principle doesn't just apply to OSS,…
Read More »Reverb Networks joins Nokia Networks in OSS Interoperability Initiative (OSSii). Self-optimizing network (SON) specialist Reverb Networks has signed a bi-lateral agreement with Nokia Networks within the OSS Interoperability Initiative (OSSii) to ensure the future availability and reliability of network data formats for their popular SON solution, InteliSON. The OSSii was founded by Nokia Networks, Ericsson, and Huawei as the initiating parties, with the aim of simplifying…
Read More »"You need to overcome the tug of people against you as you reach for high goals." George S. Patton. Long-time readers of this blog will be familiar with the use of Seth Godin's thrashing principle in OSS to attempt to get a scope locked in and developed against. The reality is that despite all the best intentions, it's incredibly rare for changes in scope to appear…
Read More »Top 10 Global Telecom Operator Standardizes on CSG Mediation. CSG International announced that one of the world’s top 10 global telecom operators, according to Total Telecom’s annual Global 100 report, has selected CSG as its preferred network data mediation solution provider. This latest agreement expands CSG’s current relationship with the operator and builds upon the positive results achieved using CSG Intermediate in the client’s operations in…
Read More »"Data visualisation is a growing field of expertise. It combines the skills of the designer with those of the developer and the journalist, to create interactive layouts that help people explore data for themselves." Olly Arbor. Do you have a dataviz expert on your OSS team? If ever there were a field that needed dataviz, OSS would be it. OSS collect ridiculously large volumes of data.…
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