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Redknee signs with Omantel

Redknee Signs Multi-Million Dollar Contract with Omantel. Redknee Solutions Inc. announced that Omantel, a leading operator in the Middle East and a provider of multi-play services, has signed a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract to upgrade to the latest version of Redknee’s converged charging platform, Redknee Unified, in support of Omantel’s 4G/LTE network. The highly scalable and flexible solution provides Omantel with innovative real-time charging and billing…

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11/12/2014 No Comments

Atlantic Broadband extends with CSG

Atlantic Broadband Extends Contract with CSG. CSG International announced that Atlantic Broadband, the nation's 13th largest cable operator, has extended its contract with CSG to provide comprehensive billing and customer care solutions across the enterprise. Under the terms of the six-year extension, Atlantic Broadband will continue its use of CSG’s pre-integrated, end-to-end billing solution to reduce operational and network costs. The solution suite creates efficiencies through…

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11/12/2014 No Comments

Customer solutions or requirements?

"The formulation of the problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill." Albert Einstein. If you've ever been a solutions integrator or an implementing vendor, have you ever noticed that the more technically proficient your customer is, the more likely you are to receive their specifications as "required solutions" rather than requirements? There are three…

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11/12/2014 No Comments

Blue Ridge Communications extends NetCracker

Blue Ridge Communications Signs Multi-Year Renewal for NetCracker Revenue Management Solution. NetCracker Technology announced that Blue Ridge Communications has agreed to a multi-year renewal for its licensed NetCracker Revenue Management solution. This solution will support ordering, billing, provisioning and operations for Blue Ridge’s pay-TV, on-demand, high-speed data and voice services. Blue Ridge Communications, a division of Pencor Services, Inc., is one of the longest operating cable…

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10/12/2014 No Comments

I already know what I know

"If you make listening and observation your occupation you will gain much more than you can by talk." Robert Baden-Powell. I already know what I know, so I'm not learning anything new when I'm talking. I don't get the chance to learn what you know when I'm talking. I've recently started a new OSS project with a product that I haven't used before, which is integrating…

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10/12/2014 No Comments

Instant feedback

"We all need people who will give us feedback. That's how we improve." Bill Gates. I was having an interesting chat about ivory towers in OSS development with a learned colleague named Steve recently and had a lightbulb moment. Whilst we have a feedback form on every single page of a SaaS product my company has developed, it never dawned on me that OSS should incorporate…

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09/12/2014 No Comments

OMG! It’s soooo not about you

"We shall listen, not lecture; learn, not threaten. We will enhance our safety by earning the respect of others and showing respect for them." Theodore C. Sorensen. Last year I wrote "the first date analogy for OSS," about two vastly different approaches to selling to a potential OSS customer. Over the years, I've seen many vendor presentations whilst assisting customers with their OSS product selections. One…

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08/12/2014 No Comments

Marketing OSS as a service

"In looking at ways and means of marketing the specific features of service products, the management of the relationship with the customer is, thus, always important. The nature of a service also makes it hard for the customer to evaluate an offer prior to purchase. Unlike a car, it cannot be test-driven; it is difficult to encapsulate in a technical specification; and quality is uncertain. As…

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05/12/2014 No Comments

Telstra customers go live on CSG

First Telstra Customers Live on CSG’s Enterprise Billing and Mediation Solution. CSG International announced that the first of Telstra Corporation Limited’s enterprise customers has gone live on a new solution deployed by CSG to transform the complex corporate billing environment of Australia’s leading telecommunications and information services company. CSG is providing its award-winning CSG Singleview convergent billing platform in a managed services environment to consolidate multiple…

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04/12/2014 No Comments

Forget the lock-in contracts

"It is more shameful to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them." Confucius. Further to yesterday's blog about OSS Consulting by Walking Around (CBWA), consultants and vendors should be continually striving to understand their client's businesses better. That's a given of course. It's not the duration of the placement (of product in the case of vendors or of the assignment in the case of…

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04/12/2014 No Comments

Consulting by wandering around

"The term management by wandering around (MBWA), also management by walking around, refers to a style of business management which involves managers wandering around, in an unstructured manner, through the workplace(s), at random, to check with employees, or equipment, about the status of ongoing work. The emphasis is on the word wandering as an impromptu movement within a workplace, rather than a plan where employees expect…

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03/12/2014 No Comments

New OSS business models

"(start-ups) have to think about making money. From day one they have to figure out the best working business model for their social business. Fortunately there are a quite a few business models out there to evaluate: subscription, affiliate & referrals, lead generation, selling virtual goods or content, discounts & deals, freemium and … advertising." TheMetisFiles.com. Last week I spoke about "The Enterprise OSS play" and…

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02/12/2014 No Comments

What does DevOps mean to OSS?

"The specific goals of a DevOps approach include improved deployment frequency, which can lead to faster time to market, lower failure rate of new releases, shortened lead time between fixes, and faster mean time to recovery in the event of a new release crashing or otherwise disabling the current system. Simple processes become increasingly programmable and dynamic, using a DevOps approach, which aims to maximize the…

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01/12/2014 1 Comment

Defective quality analysis

"Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort." John Ruskin. The telco industry is well known for having a five nines (ie 99.999%) up-time engineering standard. That's about 5 minutes of down-time per year. That's pretty impressive, although granted it still leaves room for improvement. OSS are used to measure figures like up-time (and many more of course). This gives CSPs…

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28/11/2014 No Comments

NetworkMining and ALU deliver to TNB in Malaysia

Alcatel-Lucent Malaysia and NetworkMining sign cooperation agreement for APAC market. Alcatel-Lucent and Network Mining, an independent supplier of IP & optical network mediation software, today announces that Network Mining software has been deployed at Tenaga Nasional Berhad (“TNB”), the largest electricity utility in Malaysia and a leading utility company in Asia. The software will enable TNB to optimize the management of its mission-critical, nationwide optical transmission…

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27/11/2014 No Comments

The momentum spiral

"The world is wide, and I will not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum." Frances E. Willard. As you all know already, OSS projects can be large, complex and cumbersome. Over the years, I've found so many different styles of inertia at play, some conspiratorial, but mostly related to fear of the unknown... And there are many unknowns when starting…

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27/11/2014 No Comments

The enterprise OSS play

"...most of today’s open source companies license under an Apache software license (ASL), which lets the vendor decide whether to share code changes with the community or keep them as proprietary. Under this hybrid or dual-license, open source companies can charge for proprietary product extensions, and not just for services and support, accelerating revenue growth and improving margins." Aaref Hilaly in just a small snippet of…

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26/11/2014 2 Comments

Screen scraping in OSS

"...the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) is due to hear arguments from Ryanair and a Dutch price comparison business about the extent to which rules contained in the EU's Database Directive apply to data that is not protected by copyright or a 'sui generis' database right. The CJEU's judgment on the matter, which is unlikely to be issued for many months, will determine the…

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25/11/2014 No Comments

Data integrity planning

"My current project is on data integrity where telco has number of bespoke inventory systems, systems acquired as part of M&As and COTS product. I am trying to put end to end story line in terms of process for data extraction, data investigation and analysis, data correction, impact on upstream and downstream systems. There can be number of scenarios that we need to consider in each…

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24/11/2014 No Comments

The fishing continuum

"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." Chinese Proverb. This old proverb is oft quoted - to the point of being clichéd. It describes two ends of a fishing continuum that are used to analogise business situations like coaching and consultancy. Perhaps even OSS consultancy. But there's another state in…

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21/11/2014 No Comments