Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

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

OSS flight simulator

"Firefighters naturally swap stories after every fire, and by doing so they multiply their experience; after years of hearing stories, they have a richer, more complete mental catalog of critical situations they might confront during a fire and the appropriate responses to those situations. Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment. Similarly, hearing…

31/10/2014 No Comments

Redknee Supports SingTel Optus

Redknee Supports SingTel Optus Wholesale. Redknee Solutions Inc. announced that it is supporting Optus Wholesale, a division of Optus and one of Australia’s top providers of wholesale telecom services with Redknee’s fully managed, cloud-based solution. This enables Optus Wholesale to achieve rapid time-to-market, and provides an efficient model for operators, delivering a turnkey wholesale billing solution that is reliable and scalable to meet the demands of…

30/10/2014 No Comments

Deliberate practice

"people who climb to the top of just about any field eclipse their peers through something as basic as deliberate practice." Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler, from their book, "Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change." Patterson et al also make an interesting point in the above-mentioned book that Olympic ice-skaters tend to practice what they can't do (yet), good skaters…

30/10/2014 No Comments

Out of the box!

“Smart people are a dime a dozen. What matters is the ability to think different... to think out of the box.” Walter Isaacson. I love the “out of the box” terminology that some OSS sales people use, implying that their toolsets are fully functional straight after installation, analogous to a spreadsheet or word processing application. What “out of the box” really means is that the box…

29/10/2014 No Comments

A single vendor’s throat to choke

"OpenFlow facilitates the use of “bare metal switches” and eliminates traditional vendor lock-in, giving you freedom of choice in networking like you have on other areas of your IT infrastructure such as compute and storage. SDN controllers also expose APIs northbound, which allow you to deploy a wide range of off-the-shelf and custom-built network applications — many of which were fundamentally not feasible prior to the…

28/10/2014 No Comments

The blame game intensifies

"With the multivendor CSP environment of today, it’s a blame game if there is something going on with the network. Just imagine throwing a lot more vendors and solutions into the mix. Unlike what we have today, an NFV proposed solution can have the VNF from one vendor and hardware from another. On top of that, there will be multiple options for the OpenStack distribution and…

27/10/2014 No Comments

OSS conflation

"Conflation occurs when the identities of two or more individuals, concepts, or places, sharing some characteristics of one another, seem to be a single identity — the differences appear to become lost. In logic, it is the practice of treating two distinct concepts as if they were one, which produces errors or misunderstandings as a fusion of distinct subjects tends to obscure analysis of relationships which…

24/10/2014 No Comments

Redknee virtualises Oi

Redknee Enables Oi to Successfully Leverage Virtualization. Redknee Solutions Inc. announced that Oi, a leading mobile operator in Brazil, has successfully trialled Redknee’s suite of virtualized billing, charging and policy management solutions to drive roaming subscriptions and to ensure high quality wireless connectivity for those attending one of the largest sporting events in the world, the 2014 FIFA World Cup. With Redknee’s highly flexible and scalable…

23/10/2014 No Comments

Please mind the gap

"In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence." Laurence J. Peter. In yesterday's blog, we discussed the hierarchy of communication by management systems. It reminded me of a story from a project I worked on many years ago in a developing country. Communication at this organisation was firmly rooted in the military model described in yesterday's post. Strategy was pushed out…