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Wave Selects CSG

Wave Selects CSG for Comprehensive Customer Care and Billing Solution. CSG International announced that WaveDivision Holdings, LLC, a cable and broadband services company, has chosen CSG to provide a single unified billing solution across the enterprise. Under the terms of the new five-year agreement, CSG will deploy and manage a comprehensive billing solution for Wave that will support all video, voice, and data subscribers across residential,…

20/11/2014 No Comments

Go to the source

"The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge." Thomas Berger. Source data is often the bane of the data migrator. We go to all lengths to manipulate, cleanse, create and otherwise fix errors in the data. But sometimes it's simpler than that. Sometimes we have the opportunity of going to the source and fixing the data there before it gets handed…

20/11/2014 No Comments

The OSS canary

"Life for an actual canary in a coal mine could be described in three words: "short but meaningful." Early coal mines did not feature ventilation systems, so legend has it that miners would bring a caged canary into new coal seams. Canaries are especially sensitive to methane and carbon monoxide, which made them ideal for detecting any dangerous gas build-ups. As long as the bird kept…

19/11/2014 No Comments

Beware of side deals

"A shady business never yields a sunny life." B. C. Forbes. Years ago I was assigned to advise the executive leadership team of a very large incumbent carrier on the installation of their first-ever OSS project. Prior to my arrival, they'd had a vendor selected for them that was not quite of their own choosing. Big OSS Vendor A, let's call them BOVA, was coming 4th…

18/11/2014 No Comments

Completeness vs database efficiency

"Partitioning addresses key issues in supporting very large tables and indexes by letting you decompose them into smaller and more manageable pieces called partitions. SQL queries and DML statements do not need to be modified in order to access partitioned tables. However, after partitions are defined, DDL statements can access and manipulate individuals partitions rather than entire tables or indexes. This is how partitioning can simplify…

17/11/2014 2 Comments

Centina Systems is No. 291 in Fast 500

Centina Systems Named One of the Fastest Growing Companies in North America on Deloitte’s 2014 Technology Fast 500. Centina Systems, a provider in strategic assurance analytics and network management solutions for communications service providers (CSPs) worldwide, today announced it ranked No. 291 on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500™, a ranking of the 500 fastest growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences and clean technology companies in North America.…

14/11/2014 No Comments

Exatel S.A. Chooses CSG

Exatel S.A. Chooses CSG Assure to Improve Voice Quality and the Customer Experience. Exatel S.A, one of the largest voice transit carriers in Poland, and CSG International announced that Exatel has chosen CSG Assure to boost the customer experience with improved quality of service. CSG Assure boasts one of the world's largest test networks. It is delivered in the cloud as software-as-a-service (SaaS) to reduce installation…

14/11/2014 No Comments

3D cellular modelling

"* Traffic from wireless and mobile devices will exceed traffic from wired devices by 2016. * Global IP traffic has increased fivefold over the past 5 years, and will increase threefold over the next 5years. * Busy-hour (or the busiest 60?minute period in a day) Internet traffic increased 32 percent in 2013, compared with 25 percent growth in average traffic." Statistics from Cisco's Visual Networking Index…

14/11/2014 2 Comments

Optus signs massive deal with NetCracker

Optus Selects NetCracker and NEC for OSS Transformation Program NetCracker Technology and NEC Corp. announced that Optus, a wholly owned subsidiary of Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel) and an Australian leader in integrated telecommunications, delivering cutting-edge communications, information technology and entertainment services, has selected them to deliver a comprehensive, multi-phased upgrade program. Working with NetCracker and NEC Australia, this project will allow Optus to upgrade its existing OSS…

13/11/2014 No Comments

Fork me. Version rippling

"The quickest way to enter the fourth dimension is through an operation called Fork. A fork copies a three-dimensional repository, creating two equal but distinct repositories. A commit performed against one repository has no impact on the other, which means the codebases contained within will become more and more different, and eventually evolve into different applications altogether." Alex Papadimoulis, here on theDailyWTF. The biggest CSPs tend…

13/11/2014 No Comments

A drag and drop dream

"As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product." Jef Raskin. A dream of mine since 2000, the days when Oracle forms were the user interface to the OSS I was using, was the ability to provide drag and drop provisioning of services / circuits. The dream was basically a rip-off of Visio's concept of using stitching building blocks (stencils) together to form…

12/11/2014 2 Comments

OSS Market Research

"You already have zero privacy. Get over it." Scott G. McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems Inc, stated back in 1999 believe it or not! Note that I'm not being flippant about privacy, but please read on. :) Today's blog is more of an open question to you dear readers, which follows on from the trailing sentence in "The Trillion-Dollar Treasure Chest": Are you aware of any…

11/11/2014 No Comments

Telco REITs

"Windstream, a leading provider of advanced network communications, announced plans to spin off certain telecommunications network assets into an independent, publicly traded real estate investment trust (REIT). The transaction will enable Windstream to accelerate network investments, provide enhanced services to customers and maximize shareholder value. The transaction will allow the REIT, which will own Windstream’s existing fiber and copper network and other fixed real estate assets,…

10/11/2014 No Comments

Juniper introduces Contrail Cloud

Juniper Introduces OpenStack-based Contrail Cloud. Juniper Networks introduced Contrail Cloud, a new OpenStack-based software platform for cloud resource orchestration and lifecycle management that brings together compute, network, storage and virtualization. Contrail Cloud works with Contrail Networking, formerly known as Juniper Networks Contrail SDN Controller, to provide the foundation, framework and ecosystem that enables the delivery of a turnkey NFV solution. It delivers virtual network functions (VNFs)…

08/11/2014 No Comments

Propinquity – part two

"Propinquity can be more than just physical distance. Residents of an apartment building living near a stairway, for example, tend to have more friends from other floors than those living further from the stairway." Wikipedia. Following on from yesterday's post about enhancing propinquity between your product and project teams, the second part of the story is about leveraging this stairway effect of propinquity. The stairway effect is…

07/11/2014 No Comments

Propinquity

"[Propinquity] refers to the physical or psychological proximity between people. Propinquity can mean physical proximity, a kinship between people, or a similarity in nature between things ("like-attracts-like"). Two people living on the same floor of a building, for example, have a higher propinquity than those living on different floors, just as two people with similar political beliefs possess a higher propinquity than those whose beliefs strongly…

06/11/2014 2 Comments

HP and Wind River Partner on NFV

The following news story provides an intriguing page in the carrier-grade NFV story. Whilst other vendors, alliances and even the standards bodies have focussed on the architectures, hardware platforms and virtualised network functions, as is often the case, OSS has seemed to be an afterthought. [Aside: I find this perspective interesting, because I strongly believe that OSS will be the pivot that will curtail or propel NFV/SDN into…

05/11/2014 No Comments

Value doesn’t equal price

"[Guy]Kawasaki told the audience that this was one of the most important learnings from Jobs: “Price is something you pay on the first day, but value is the sum total of the experience.”." Max Nyman on the Comptel blog. I recently assisted a customer through a vendor selection process as they migrated away from their home-grown network management system to a new vendor-supplied OSS. The selected…

05/11/2014 No Comments

Optimists are the best innovators

"[Guy] Kawasaki concluded by saying that skeptics aren’t the best innovators. Optimists are. In order ignite a paradigm change, you have to be able to see something valuable, unique and something that doesn’t yet exist and make it happen. Comptel believes Kawaski’s innovative mindset is also important in the context of the telecommunications industry. Now, more than ever, communications service providers (CSPs) should find new ways…

04/11/2014 No Comments

You’re going to screw up. Accept it

"You're going to screw up. Accept it." Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler, from their book, "Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change." Production databases can be a scary environment for operators who are taking over the reins of a new OSS that has been implemented by others (eg vendors, integrators, etc). There tends to be a fear of the unknown of…

03/11/2014 No Comments

Spark chooses Ericsson

Ericsson powers Spark New Zealand's IT transformation. Ericsson announced that Spark New Zealand, the leading telecom operator in New Zealand, has deployed Ericsson Service Agility Suite to reengineer its IT platforms to achieve agility improvements. At the Ericsson OSS/BSS Summit 2014 being held October 28 - 30 in New York, Dr. Claire Barber, General Manager of Change and Technology for Spark, detailed how the rollout has…

01/11/2014 No Comments

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