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The Trillion-Dollar Treasure Chest

"Integrated operators are sitting on a veritable gold mine. Monetizing passive assets could unlock billions of dollars—enough to wipe out their [traditional telcos's] entire debt." Liu, Garg and Bhagat in this article on ATKearney.com. I really recommend taking a close look at the link above. Being an OSS-nerd, this report takes me to a different perspective on ways that traditional telcos can ease the CAPEX pressures…

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03/10/2014 2 Comments

Augmented Outside Plant – Part 2

In an earlier blog entry, I wrote about using Augmented Reality (AR) to equip field staff with views of physical assets (eg underground, data centre, etc) (and OSS data of course). Well, I've just found out that such a product exists from a company called Augview (perhaps there are others I'm unaware of too?). The following video provides a demonstration of Augview:

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02/10/2014 No Comments

Ericsson acquires Ambient

Ericsson completes acquisition of smart grid communications provider, Ambient. Ericsson announced it has completed the acquisition of Ambient Corporation, a US-based award-winning provider of smart grid communications technology for utilities. Ambient's innovative platform enables utilities to deploy and integrate multiple smart grid applications and technologies, in parallel on a single communications infrastructure. The acquisition increases Ericsson's ability to help utilities maximize their investments in smart grids.…

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02/10/2014 No Comments

The Triple Constraint of OSS

"Central to the work of a project manager is balancing competing demands. The term “triple constraint” is a well-known phrase in project management that refers to the competing demands of scope, time, and cost. The manner in which these three demands are balanced affects quality. If one of these factors is affected, at least one other factor will also be affected. For example, if the scope…

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02/10/2014 2 Comments

Clarity Telecom Selects NetCracker

Clarity Telecom Selects NetCracker Revenue Management for Long-Term Managed Services Agreement. NetCracker Technology announced that Clarity Telecom has agreed to a multi-year, hosted managed services arrangement through which it will leverage NetCracker’s order entry, provisioning, billing and revenue management solutions. The use of these solutions will enable Clarity to support its consumer triple-play service offerings as the operator rapidly expands with aggressive merger and acquisition activity.…

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01/10/2014 No Comments

Accenture and Alcatel-Lucent Collaborate

Accenture and Alcatel-Lucent Collaborate to Help Clients Monetize Ultra-Broadband Opportunities. Accenture and Alcatel-Lucent have formed a strategic alliance to help communications service providers (CSPs) and large enterprises implement integrated ultra-broadband solutions to address the challenges of rising costs and increased data consumption caused by high demand from digital customers and applications. The agreement calls for the two companies to form the Accenture Alcatel-Lucent Business Group. Its…

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01/10/2014 No Comments

Mobile service assurance

"To offer true, proactive service assurance, mobile operators must monitor three levels of performance. The first is the overall network and service availability – is my network up? Is this service available for subscribers to access? Second is the actual performance of the network – what is the throughput of my network? Is the service experiencing any jitter or latency? Finally, it is all about how…

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01/10/2014 No Comments

Return on Analytics (ROA)

"Return On Investment (ROI) for analytics and business intelligence solutions is increasing and currently delivering on average $13.01 for every dollar spent, according to a new analysis by Nucleus Research. The study analyzes the actual costs and benefits of Nucleus published case studies on individual companies’ analytics deployments." BusinessWire. Have you ever tried to quantify the ROI for analytics that you perform on your OSS /…

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30/09/2014 No Comments

Dot your API’s and cross your t’s

“And will you succeed? Yes indeed, yes indeed! Ninety-eight and three-quarters percent guaranteed!” Dr. Seuss. Linking keys are an important consideration for cross-referencing disparate data sets. And in OSS you have lots of disparate data sets to pull together. For example, every different NMS, EMS, BSS (and even other OSS tools) create / manage disparate data sets. Some of the greatest insights delivered by an OSS…

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29/09/2014 2 Comments

Ericsson to acquire GEOSS

Ericsson announces intention to acquire GEOSS consulting firm. Ericsson announced its intention to acquire GEOSS, an operations support systems (OSS) consulting company based in Germany. The acquisition, which is subject to regulatory approval, further strengthens Ericsson’s already industry-leading position in OSS for communications service providers. Ericsson intends to take over the entire staff and management of 30 people. GEOSS’ core competencies include consultancy, systems development, systems…

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28/09/2014 No Comments

Telefonica selects Comarch again

Telefonica selects Comarch as the recommended supplier of configuration management, network planning & design for LatAm and Germany. Comarch will support Telefónica in a large transformation aimed at modernizing their networks, operations and OSS. Comarch announced that Telefónica, one of the world's leading service providers with 316 million customers, selected Comarch as the recommended vendor of Configuration Management, Network Planning & Design for Latin America and…

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27/09/2014 No Comments

China Mobile and Gemalto deploy NFC

China Mobile and Gemalto deploy NFC transport in Beijing. Gemalto has been selected by China Mobile to offer its UpTeq NFC Multi-tenant SIMs to protect consumer credentials used for mobile contactless applications?, starting with mass transit services in Beijing. China Mobile is the largest operator in the world with a total subscriber base of close to 800 million. Gemalto pre-loads the SIMs with the Beijing transport…

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27/09/2014 No Comments

Open source software supportability

"When it comes to software, I much prefer free software, because I have very seldom seen a program that has worked well enough for my needs, and having sources available can be a life-saver." Linus Torvalds. I recently had an interesting conversation with a very bright young man who is just starting out on his career. During the wide-ranging discussion he asked why more organisations don't…

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26/09/2014 No Comments

Managing the managed services

"Managed services are one of the areas where CSPs still hold sway because they are able to provide the diversity of voice, date, video, collaboration, etc and geographical coverage that the niche players can't. As such, this is a very important revenue source to CSPs where their old cash-cows (eg voice, ISDN, etc) are drying up. CSPs are increasingly offering services that go beyond the old…

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25/09/2014 No Comments

Ericsson to acquire Apcera

Ericsson acquires majority stake in enterprise IT cloud company Apcera. Ericsson announced it has agreed to acquire a majority stake in Apcera, a U.S.-based enterprise services company and creator of the next-generation platform as-a-service (PaaS) called Continuum(TM) which works across cloud, on premise and hybrid environments. In addition, Ericsson commits to significant funding toward development of next-generation technology as well as sales channel and ecosystem creation.…

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24/09/2014 No Comments

Cisco to acquire Metacloud and Memoir

Cisco has announced intent to acquire two organisations: Metacloud: deploys and operates private clouds for global organizations with a unique OpenStack-as-a-Service model that delivers and remotely operates production-ready private clouds in a customer’s data center. Metacloud’s OpenStack-based cloud platform will accelerate Cisco’s strategy to build the world's largest global Intercloud, a network of clouds, together with key partners to address customer requirements for a globally distributed, highly…

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24/09/2014 No Comments

NFV Acronyms

Here's a little cheat-sheet for NFV (Network Function Virtualisation) if you're suffering DBA (Death By Acronym). I hope you find it useful. The right-most columns refer to the NFV document that each acronym was sourced from, whereby the following links take you to those documents: NFV-001 and NFV-MAN001. Acronym Description NFV-002 NFV-MAN001 ADC Application Delivery Controller . Y API Application Programming Interface . Y BRAS Broadband…

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24/09/2014 No Comments

NFV is really three pieces

"NFV is really three pieces; the virtual network functions (VNFs) deployed to create service features, the NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) that serves as the platform for hosting/connection of the VNFs, and the management/orchestration (MANO) functions that do the deployment and management. The goal of all of this is to create a framework for deploying service logic in an agile way on a pool of virtualized resources." Tom…

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23/09/2014 No Comments

A rapid growth field

"To be successful you have to be lucky, or a little mad, or very talented, or find yourself in a rapid growth field." Edward de Bono. Regular readers will have seen my regular references to valuable tripods in the OSS world. They are the few who are able to make valuable connections across the following three domains: IT Systems - Databases, servers, high-availability architectures, programming, SDLC, application integrations, automated…

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22/09/2014 No Comments

Huawei and Infosys announce alliance

Huawei and Infosys Announce Global Partnership to Offer Cloud, Big Data and Communication Solutions. Huawei and Infosys announced a global partnership to jointly offer enterprise customers with cloud, big data and communication solutions. The alliance brings together the Huawei’s expertise in information communication technology, particularly cloud infrastructure and Infosys’ global IT service expertise. Collaborating to develop IT solutions, the partnership will target enterprise customers seeking to…

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20/09/2014 No Comments

Telefonica selects Huawei

Telefónica Selects Huawei as its Partner for Operations Support System (OSS) Solution. Huawei announced Telefónica has chosen Huawei and its end to end Performance Management Solution to manage its Latin-American networks. Telefonica chose Huawei’s OSS Solution – which became commercially available in June 2014 – as part of its OSS simplification strategy in Performance Management. Huawei’s Performance Management Solution offers one unified approach to manage all…

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20/09/2014 No Comments