Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

25/11/2014 No Comments

Gartner releases OSS magic quadrant 2014

Gartner's magic quadrant for OSS for 2014 can be downloaded from this link on Netcracker.com. Hat tips to James at www.OSSline.com for alerting us to this link.

24/11/2014 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…

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…

21/11/2014 No Comments

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…