"(Marissa) Mayer was hired by Google as a coder. Her first big project was to build Google's advertising system. It took her months and months to make any progress. Then Google went out and hired a star coder from DEC named Jeff Dean. Dean came into Google and built the system Mayer was trying to build in a matter of weeks. Mayer, who already decided she…
Read More »"Smart phones and social media expand our universe. We can connect with others or collect information easier and faster than ever." Daniel Goleman. Communication Service Providers are often not so great at communicating, especially internally. Notwithstanding the human behavioural impediments to "perfect communication" like politics, cliques, etc the communication issue is often just a case of there being too many people in the organisation to keep…
Read More »"The FCC's latest wireless auction brought in far more money than anyone expected. The Chairman, Tom Wheeler, set a goal of raising $10.6 billion by selling off 1,600 licenses to blocks of wireless spectrum. In the end, the government not only blew past its goal, but also its previous record of raising $19.1 billion in 2008, when it auctioned off significant pieces of the 700Mhz band…
Read More »"The innovation point is the pivotal moment when talented and motivated people seek the opportunity to act on their ideas and dreams." W. Arthur Porter. It goes without saying that key players in the OSS industry try to keep their major innovations under wraps. They're not exactly going to announce that they're working on technology X and hope to bring a innovation to the market within…
Read More »“Those people who develop the ability to continuously acquire new and better forms of knowledge that they can apply to their work and to their lives will be the movers and shakers in our society for the indefinite future.” Brian Tracy. I often talk about the need to provide training and learning opportunities for customers in their own voice (eg "Training with contextual data"). When it…
Read More »“Did you also attend fascinating presentations? What would be your advice to get your audience passionate?” Roland Leners of NetworkMining in response to an earlier blog about boring OSS presentations. This is a brilliant question, one that I wished I had’ve asked myself when writing the earlier blog. It gets to the root of the topic – how to deliver OSS presentations that have more impact.…
Read More »Telefonica Selects Amdocs for Multi-Channel, Quad-Play Transformation in Brazil. Amdocs announced that Telefonica, one of the world's leading service providers, has selected Amdocs for a business support systems (BSS) transformation project in Brazil to provide a seamless, multi-channel experience for Vivo's quad-play customers across wireline (including fiber), wireless (pre- and postpaid), Internet (including fiber) and TV (including IPTV). The project spans customer relationship management including self-service;…
Read More »Amdocs Enters Into Five-Year Managed Services Contract for Business and Operational Support Systems (B/OSS) with U.S. Cellular. Amdocs announced that U.S. Cellular, the fifth largest wireless carrier in the United States, has entered into an agreement with Amdocs to manage the operations of a range of its business and operational support systems (B/OSS). The five-year agreement covers key B/OSS areas including service activation, customer care and…
Read More »"Sometimes you'll be required to magically create a communication that's perfectly aimed at two (or more) distinct audiences....The only practical answer is to write your copy to whatever aspects the audiences have in common, particularly tonally. If you put what you know about each audience in a Venn diagram, you're writing to the middle bit where they all overlap. Although, as you can imagine, writing to…
Read More »Telenor Sweden selects MYCOM OSI for Network Performance Management MYCOM OSI, announced that the NIMS-PrOptima™ Service and Network Performance Management platform has been selected by Telenor Sweden to manage the performance of its mobile and fixed networks. Telenor Sweden’s strategy requires a new performance management solution to gather and use data from various network domains including RAN, CS Core, PS Core, VAS, IP and Probes. Telenor…
Read More »"You cannot bore someone into buying your product." David Ogilvy. As my domain name indicates, I'm passionate about OSS, so I love seeing presentations and demonstrations of OSS products / implementations. I'm fascinated by the subject matter, yet I've sat through many demonstrations that were dead-pan boring. Invariably the presenters were stuck in the features / functions rather than the benefits. If they were boring to…
Read More »"The problem with requiring people to be loud and angry to get things done is that you're now surrounded by people who are loud and angry." Seth Godin in this blog. The beauty of working as a consultant is having the opportunity to experience many different corporate cultures. Seth's blog reminded me of a small handful of past projects where the environment was aggressive and toxic. You…
Read More »The network and network management worlds are watching on with interest as the network virtualisation snowball gains momentum. Passionate About OSS has hosted many posts on this subject, so I have created a new category here (https://passionateaboutoss.com/category/virtualisation/) that will allow readers to find posts on this subject matter more easily. For the moment, I've excluded press releases that relate to network virtualisation. What do you think?…
Read More »"If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization." Gerald Weinberg. Interesting perspective. It's not just pointing a finger at programmers either. It's effectively giving everyone in the software development industry a whack including business analysts, testers, etc. Some would say that software is first-of-its-kind, with everything being invented as the application develops and because of…
Read More »NetCracker Drives Major BSS and e-Commerce Transformation for Bright House Networks. NetCracker Technology announced that Bright House Networks has completed the first phase of a large-scale, multi-phase BSS and customer experience transformation program. This program encompasses billing system consolidation and replacement, new CRM and e-commerce implementations, as well as a large managed services relationship. Bright House Networks is among the leading multi-channel video service and cable…
Read More »Redknee Supports Vodafone India’s Data Subscribers. Redknee Solutions Inc. announced that it is supporting Vodafone India to deliver the benefits of real-time charging to its Pan-India active prepaid and postpaid data subscribers. Vodafone India is leveraging the latest release of Redknee Unified Charging to boost its data subscribers’ adoption and enhance customer satisfaction. In addition, Vodafone India will use Redknee’s customer care solution to provide advanced…
Read More »"Every truth has two sides; it is as well to look at both, before we commit ourselves to either." Aesop. As the old saying goes, there are two sides to every story. Equally, there are two sides to every OSS interface (or possibly more if you including middleware, etc). Each side of the interface tends to be documented, specified, etc... often ad finitum it seems. That's…
Read More »"What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, 'This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust…
Read More »"A man without a smiling face must not open a shop." Chinese Proverb. It seems logical that OSS vendors want their products to reach a critical mass, whereby they no longer rely on their own marketing efforts alone. They want to reach a point where other people / organisations are selling their products. There appears to be two main avenues to this objective: Free distribution that…
Read More »"A lot of people asked me if it was frustrating not having a clear specific diagnosis, but I didn't mind, I just chose the most optimistic diagnosis." Karen Duffy. Predictive analytics has become a bit of a cliche for the OSS industry, one which I've succumbed to using too (see these previous blogs as but a few examples - 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5). As…
Read More »"Nobody will ever pay you to solve your problems... but they’ll line up if you can solve theirs." Ramit Sethi. OSS were originally designed to coordinate and streamline network management processes for CSPs. OSS helped CSPs solve operational problems. They still do. Keeping Ramit Sethi's quote in mind, if we have a customer that needs help processing vast numbers of service orders and we provide them…
Read More »