Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

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…

23/10/2014 No Comments

The military communication model

"....I thought about the problem of communication of vision and strategy a lot, but I didn’t realise how the functional, hierarchical structure we’d borrowed from the military made communication in large organisations possible. Thinking a lot more about it since, I think the military model – the foundation of the industrial, functional, hierarchical organisation structure – is a communication-driven model… First, I led the development of…

22/10/2014 No Comments

The stampede analogy

"....once you start a company transformation, it's like a stampede. If you try to lead from the front, you get trampled; if you try to lead from the back, you have no impact. Best to lead from the side by carefully nudging and turning the stampede to avoid everyone going over the cliff." Robert D. Austin, Richard L. Nolan, Shannon O'Donnell in their book, "Harder Than…

21/10/2014 No Comments

Pre-cognitive analytics

"There are two ways to look at analytics in an Operations environment: • POST Cognitive • PRE Cognitive Post-cognitive is focusing your service management efforts on looking at events that occurred in a history after an outage. Post-cognitive is akin to driving down the road while looking out of the back window." Dougie Stevenson on Moogsoft.com. There are two concepts relating to service assurance in Dougie's article…

20/10/2014 No Comments

Ericsson acquires Sentilla

Ericsson acquires Sentilla to enhance cloud management and analytics capabilities. Ericsson announced that it has acquired Redwood City, CA-based Sentilla Corp., a provider of IT infrastructure intelligence software. The deal enhances Ericsson’s ability to help service providers support IT organizations that are struggling to overcome new network complexities introduced by mobility and the cloud. Sentilla develops software for optimal performance, real-time workload management and intelligent deployment…

18/10/2014 No Comments

Helix factors, cable sag factors and more

"In fiber optics, the cable is a light pipe or waveguide, into which you inject light. If a finger presses on the pipe, it disrupts that light within the waveguide." Jefferson Han. And if a finger pressing on the fibre can disrupt the light signal, imagine what a backhoe can do to an optical fibre cable! As a humourous aside, you may like to read Fred…

17/10/2014 1 Comment

Time to build a shorter menu?

"If IT Services departments were restaurants, they would be the most expensive, a la carte kind with long waiting lists. "Yes madam, just tell us your requirements and our food consultant will propose several different meal solutions. You can order anything you like and we will be serving it up next year!"" Jake Holloway, in this interesting article. Today's story is about a very long menu.…

16/10/2014 No Comments

Real-time sandpits

"You and I are streaming data engines." Jeff Hawkins. You'll have noticed that I often write about using sandpit environments to trial and refine different OSS configurations. They tend to be really helpful as a change management facilitation mechanism. One of the things you might be wondering is exactly what can you do in a sandpit? How does the data get into it to play with?…

15/10/2014 No Comments

Who are your most productive customers?

"...the top 15% of today’s residential subscribers in the US are said to account for about 95% of carrier profits! Thus, many service providers are looking to Next Generation Network (NGN) services as a means to attract and/or retain the most lucrative customers." Joseph C. Crimi in this white paper from Telcordia.* Do you know which 15% of customers account for 95% of your profits? What…

14/10/2014 No Comments

Data visualisation 5 – GIS

"Spatial analysis is how we understand our world—mapping where things are, how they relate, what it all means, and what actions to take. From computational analysis of geographic patterns to finding optimum routes, site selection, and advanced predictive modeling, spatial analysis is at the very heart of geographic information system (GIS) technology.." Esri. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are a invaluable platform for OSS developers to visualise…

13/10/2014 No Comments

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