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C Spire selects Centina Systems

C Spire Selects Centina Systems for Strategic Service Assurance. Centina Systems announced that C Spire™ will deploy its NetOmnia™ suite of solutions for service assurance. This will include real-time end-to-end network visibility for improved troubleshooting and problem resolution. C Spire is a full service provider of Internet, telecommunications, and network services. The company offers Triple Play services to residential customers along with a suite of fixed…

13/01/2015 No Comments

What do your customers actually use?

"My goal is no longer to get more done, but rather to have less to do." Francine Jay. A few questions for all the vendors out there. Do you know which applications within your suite that your customers actually use? Do you know which features of these applications they use? Do you know which features none of your customers use? Can you think of any reasons…

13/01/2015 No Comments

Customer Experience – Customer Experience

"The more you engage with customers the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing." John Russell. You must be wondering whether the heading above is a typo? It's not. Let me explain. This is the fifth post in my Customer Experience series. The previous four have been built around the perspectives of the OSS vendor's customer (ie the…

12/01/2015 No Comments

The worst job in OSS?

"I am convinced that nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day you bet on people, not on strategies." Larry Bossidy. In a recent post, I spoke of the challenge in getting the right balance between two scarce assets, customers and human resources. This got me thinking about how tough it is for organisations in the OSS…

09/01/2015 No Comments

Customer Experience – Operational Handover

"To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour." Winston Churchill. Following on from Implementations, the third post in this…

08/01/2015 No Comments

Telekom Srbija selects Comverse

Comverse Selected by Telekom Srbija to Modernize, Virtualize & Introduce IP Messaging, New Rich Services. Comverse announced that Telekom Srbija, the region’s leading mobile service provider, serving Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro, has selected Comverse to modernize its messaging platforms, enable IP Communication, and lay the foundation for monetizing future rich communication services (RCS). “As the regional leader, Telekom Srbija aspires to improve the lives…

07/01/2015 No Comments

Customer Experience – Implementations

"When you translate a dream into reality, it's never a full implementation. It is easier to dream than to do." Shai Agassi. After Contract Negotiations, the second post in this Customer Experience series, today's post discusses the next step, when the project moves into the implementation phase. The customer experience during the implementation stage basically revolves around variation (from the dream). CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE. Project implementation is…

07/01/2015 No Comments

Customer Experience – Contract Negotiations

"Suspicion and doubt lead to animosity and hatred." Ralph Steadman. To expand upon the first post in this Customer Experience series, which was on Product Evaluation, today's post relates to the next step, forming a contract between the customer and the winning bidder. The customer experience during the contract negotiation stage basically revolves around suspicion. Customers are a scarce commodity for even the largest vendors. As…

06/01/2015 No Comments

Updated OSS Business Case Builder

If you're in the process of defining an OSS business case or know someone who is, check out my new and improved OSS business case builder here:

05/01/2015 No Comments

Customer Experience – Product Evaluation

"Fear cannot be banished, but it can be calm and without panic; it can be mitigated by reason and evaluation" Vannevar Bush. In the Christmas Day blog, I indicated that I was going to begin a series on how OSS vendors / integrators can start with the customer experience and work back to improve their own products, services and systems. Today's blog is the first in…

02/01/2015 No Comments

Can you make a better burger than McDonalds?

"The biggest threat to McDonald's lies within - and that is us as a company becoming complacent. There are a lot of companies that get fat, dumb and happy and take their eye off the ball and forget about serving customers." Charlie Bell. How many of you could make a better burger than McDonalds? Chances are that almost 100% of you will answer that question with…

01/01/2015 No Comments

A balance of two rare OSS assets

"Every company's greatest assets are its customers, because without customers there is no company." Michael LeBoeuf. When a vendor is seeking growth (and that's most!), they focus on building up a strong customer base. As Michael LeBoeuf states above, an OSS vendor's greatest asset is its customers because of their relative scarcity. It makes sense that a vendor should be doing everything in its power to…

31/12/2014 No Comments

Comptel wins Telefonica Group Customer in Chile

Comptel Has Won a New Telefonica Group Customer in Chile. Comptel’s Fulfillment deal is a part of the Telefonica de Chile Quad-Play transformation project that will enable improved customer experience for integrated wireline, wireless, Internet and TV services. With the Telefonica de Chile deal Comptel enters a new market in South America. The order value exceeds 1.2 million EUR, comprising Comptel Provisioning and Activation and Comptel Catalog software…

31/12/2014 No Comments

Do you start with a question?

"If you torture the data long enough, it will confess." Ronald Coase. A subscriber to this blog named Paul recently asked a very thought-provoking question in relation to the context of data within this earlier post. He asked whether by "context" I meant that you come at the data with a question in mind that you're looking to solve. My definition of "context" is slightly different,…

30/12/2014 No Comments

Features tell, benefits sell

"The most common thing that pegs an entrepreneur as an amateur is when they come in and immediately start talking about their amazing new technology, and forget to start the discussion with, “What big problem in the market am I trying to solve?” If they don’t start with the problem, then I know they are green." Dina Routhier. In the post from Christmas Day, I used…

29/12/2014 No Comments

Upstream marketing and the big moves in OSS

"Upstream marketing focuses on innovation. It tries to answer two questions: where the market is moving and what customers will want next." Scott Thompson here on Chron.com. As indicated in yesterday's post, I have a series of posts coming up shortly that will look at the customer experience and how OSS might look at doing things better. Another perspective on the same message is how that…

26/12/2014 No Comments

The gift of giving

"Christmas is the spirit of giving without a thought of getting. It is happiness because we see joy in people. It is forgetting self and finding time for others. It is discarding the meaningless and stressing the true values." Thomas S. Monson. Don’t worry, I’m not actually writing about OSS on our Christmas Day holiday here in Australia. I spooled this up for post a while…

25/12/2014 No Comments

Explain the why before the how

"He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." Friedrich Nietzsche. A recent post posed the question, "have you noticed that the more technically proficient your customer is, the more likely you are to receive their specifications as "required solutions" rather than requirements?" To put this another way, the customer is telling you how to do it before telling you why they…

24/12/2014 No Comments

Training with contextual data

“It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.” Harry S Truman. In recent blogs, “Data Architecture Levels” and “Testing Architecture Levels,” the need for contextually relevant data has been mentioned. One of the other areas where contextually relevant data is essential, but very often ignored, is in training delivery. For the purposes of creating generic, repeatable training packages to ensure efficient delivery of…

23/12/2014 No Comments

Testing architecture layers

"Beware of the problem of testing too many hypotheses; the more you torture the data, the more likely they are to confess, but confessions obtained under duress may not be admissible in the court of scientific opinion." Stephen M. Stigler. In a recent post, entitled "Data Architecture Layers," we discussed the need to architect data from the perspective of both format and context. The context perspective…

22/12/2014 No Comments

The handshake analogy

"We left the meeting with a list of open issues, not a handshake." David Sacks. "Best-of-breed versus single vendor" is an age-old discussion point between OSS exponents. There is no right answer to this argument, with every customer having different needs. However, when speaking about the best-of-breed model, I sometimes use the handshake analogy to describe why we should aim to limit the number of disparate…

19/12/2014 No Comments

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