Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

Similarities and differences between airlines and telco industries

The airline industry is comprised of many regional carriers. There is no global carrier (although there are alliances). Each continent has multiple airlines. There are also local / regional airlines. Airlines of different sizes, business models and target customers. Different service offerings and different look & feel in terms of the customer experience (CX). This shares quite a few similarities with the telco industry, where there…

23/01/2024 No Comments

An OSS design principle I need your guidance on

I find that writing these blog articles is a fantastic way of assembling a variety of ideas and distilling them into coherent stories / concepts (well, hopefully they're coherent). I always welcome feedback and corrections because it helps to round out my understanding of concepts relating to OSS. Feedback from you, dear readers, is highly valued. In this article, I'm even more in need of your…

16/01/2024 No Comments

What will you do if the telco industry dies?

Christel Heydemann, Orange’s CEO, brought to our attention at MWC 2023 that a survey of European telcos indicated that almost half of the polled CEOs do not expect their businesses to make it through another decade. That's a pretty scary thing to think about if you've built your career around the telco industry and don't have a lot of exposure to other industries isn't it? I…

10/01/2024 No Comments

What’s the worst thing that could happen on an OSS transformation? (part 6)

This is the sixth of the “buyer / seller chasm" series of articles (pt1, pt2, pt3, pt4, pt5). In it, we consider how to bring Buyers and Sellers together more effectively to build better telcos. We’d previously highlighted the issues, the pain points, the sources of friction, a bunch of solutions and more. The title of this article poses the question that best exemplifies the chasm…

03/01/2024 No Comments

Closing the OSS Buyer / Seller chasm – More solutions (part 5)

This is the fifth of the “buyer / seller” chasm articles (pt1, pt2, pt3, pt4). We’d previously highlighted the issues, the pain points, the sources of friction and more about getting Buyers and Sellers together to build better telcos. But in today’s article we’ll complete the solutions list that we started on in part four, which helps to overcome those challenges by building bridges across the…

02/01/2024 No Comments

Closing the OSS Buyer / Seller chasm – Solutions (part 4)

This is the fourth of the “buyer / seller” chasm articles (pt1, pt2, pt3). We’ve already highlighted the issues, the pain points, the sources of friction and more about getting Buyers and Sellers together to build better telcos. But in today’s article we’ll explore some possibilities for how to overcome those challenges by building bridges across the Buyer / Seller chasm. Love them or loathe them,…

20/12/2023 No Comments

Using a complete re-framing to reduce the OSS Buyer / Seller chasm (part 3)

This is the third part of a series that looks into the chasm that exists between OSS/BSS buyers (eg carriers, ISPs, utilities, etc) and sellers (OSS/BSS product vendors). In part 2 we pondered whether it's possible to target a 10x reduction in operational costs. We'll take a closer look into what this means with the help of a sensational piece of investigative work and data visualisation…

15/12/2023 No Comments

How can we reduce the size of the OSS buyer-seller chasm? (part 2)

Our previous post highlighted a chasm between buyers and sellers. It has sparked quite a lot of conversation, which is exactly as intended. In another earlier post about telco reaching its burning exchange moment, we wrote: In a keynote speech at Mobile World Congress (MWC), Thierry Breton, the European Union’s internal market commissioner opined, “In the coming years, the whole industry will need to undergo a…

06/12/2023 No Comments

Could it be possible? Is the telco industry’s biggest constraint a shortage of bridge builders? (part 1)

I'm currently lucky enough to be involved in a couple of vendor selection processes where we're helping carriers (buyers) to find the best-fit OSS vendors (sellers) for their needs. Most start a vendor selection process by preparing a looooong list of requirements. This approach takes forever to write, forever to respond to and forever to evaluate. Yep, that's three forevers and we haven't even gotten to…

29/11/2023 No Comments

A Japanese tale of OSS monoliths versus modularity

There aren't a lot of podcasts out there that specialise in OSS (apart from ours of course), so I tend to listen to a lot of material from other fields, sometimes adjacent, sometimes not. I'm just coming to the end of this one with Peter Diamandis and Roger Hamilton. At over 2 hours, it's a longie but certainly a goodie! A very goodie!! https://www.diamandis.com/podcast/roger-hamilton In it,…

23/11/2023 No Comments

Revolutionising Network Operations with AIOps – Our Latest Report and Video Link

As you may have noticed, we recently launched a new report, "The Future of AIOps: A Definitive Guide." In the rapidly evolving landscape of carrier networks, Operations was and still is, the linchpin of business stability. It's effectively every telco's insurance policy. With the complexity of systems and the demand for instant resolution of issues, traditional operations teams are straining under the burden. Enter AIOps -…

13/11/2023 No Comments

The AIOps Venn Dilemma

Whilst preparing our recently launched paper, "AIOps of the Future: A Definitive Guide, " one thing came through loud and clear from the carriers we spoke with - assembling the skills-mix required to support AIOps tools / programmes. The carriers simply don't seem to be confident in being able to find, or keep, people with the right skills to drive the AIOps tools and related programmes…

04/11/2023 No Comments

Knowledge used to be power. Is it still?

Many years ago, I was lucky enough to spend a year advising the executive team of an Asian monopoly carrier. I was helping them to implement their first ever OSS project. It was a real eye-opener on many different levels. This carrier had a strong culture of hoarding knowledge. It was well known amongst the staff that you didn't share any information with anyone else, especially…

24/10/2023 No Comments

Our latest whitepaper has finally launched – AIOps of the Future: A Definitive Guide

I'm really excited to announce that a project we kicked off in collaboration with Ramandeep Bhalla, Deepak Kakadia and Rakesh Ashok, all the way back in March of 2023, has finally launched. It got a whole lot bigger than I was originally expecting. It's nearly 100 pages long, well over 30,000 words and over 40 AIOps vendors have been profiled. When we set out, we hoped…

17/10/2023 No Comments

Who are the real heroes of your OSS project? It might not be who you think!

When I first left uni with my freshly minted degrees, whenever I thought of salespeople, I had an image something like the one below in my head. This image might still be true if you're on the hunt for a used clunker. However, nothing could be further from the truth for the salespeople that make OSS projects happen. In fact, I prefer to think of these…

06/10/2023 No Comments

Getting hands-on with the OSS espresso machine

“Is there anyone in this room who can go with me to an espresso machine and make a latte?” That's what Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz reportedly asked his executive team at a November 2022 meeting, according to this WSJ article. He added: "I don’t think we can fix the systemic problem with the level of lofty knowledge that exists in this room. There's an important lesson…

03/10/2023 No Comments

The cumulative benefits of AIOps

As you will have seen in recent articles, we're due to release our latest report in a couple of weeks. It's called, "AIOps of the Future." During discussions with various people during the preparation of this report, we've noticed that some people believe they will get a silver bullet that will resolve most network events automatically, straight out of the box. Whilst these solutions certainly do…

29/09/2023 No Comments

A recurring impediment to successful implementation of AIOps: And 1 way to treat it

With our latest report, "AIOps of the Future: A Definitive Guide" tentatively penciled in for launch in 2 weeks from today, I thought I'd share a concept that kept coming through loud and clear from AIOps vendors and buyers alike - Get the data right! Especially cross-domain data! This has always been true in the world of OSS (how many OSS data death spirals have you…

26/09/2023 No Comments

Selling the destination of OSS and AIOps, not the transportation

Many of the readers of this blog veer towards the technical side of OSS (that includes me too) and therefore we could all do well to consider the old phrase, "Sell the destination, not the transportation." The phrase originally suggests that a salesperson should highlight the incredible experiences waiting for the prospective traveler in Paris, rather than the flight's features like model of plane, legroom or…

21/09/2023 No Comments

Asking your colleagues to give you AIR

Let me tell you a story. A love story. A story about data. A story about AIR. On my first OSS project, all the way back in 2000, I was brought in as a network SME. But it was only after getting involved in the data modelling and data migration activities that I really became hooked. I already knew it was possible to get a much…

14/09/2023 No Comments

A strategic OSS expert: Work smart, work lazy, build assets

Whilst reading an article on Business Insider called, "A Gen Z software engineer at Google reportedly earns $150,000 working one hour a day," I found one comment quite confronting. It wasn't the extrapolation that an 8 hour day (possibly working multiple jobs) could generate a $1.2m annual salary but the mindset. The Gen Z software engineer in question purportedly said, "It's not like you'd really get…

29/08/2023 No Comments

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