Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

Brocade Acquires Vistapointe

Brocade Acquires Vistapointe Visibility and Analytics Solutions for Mobile Network Operators. Brocade announced that it has acquired the network visibility and analytics technology assets in an all cash transaction from privately held Vistapointe, which has offices in the US, Ireland, and India. The Vistapointe technologies are software-based, carrier-grade network visibility and analytics solutions for mobile operators embracing Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) architectures. The acquisition enables Brocade…

17/09/2014 No Comments

Software in silicon

"The latest innovation with far-reaching implications for system performance is something called “software in silicon.” The concept is exactly as it sounds—putting software right into the chip for better, even faster performance." John Soat on Forbes.com. As anyone who has worked with an OSS that has a large database can attest, OSS performance can be frustrating as queries on large data sets can be glacial. As…

17/09/2014 No Comments

Who discovered water?

"We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t a fish." Marshall McLuhan. If you're completely immersed in your environment and you don't push beyond its boundaries, it tends to become invisible, just as water is to a fish. And if it's invisible, there is no sense of a need to improve that environment Unfortunately, many OSS developers don't seek a perspective from outside…

16/09/2014 No Comments

Bathtub curve

"The bathtub curve is widely used in reliability engineering. It describes a particular form of the hazard function which comprises three parts: - The first part is a decreasing failure rate, known as early failures. - The second part is a constant failure rate, known as random failures. - The third part is an increasing failure rate, known as wear-out failures. The name is derived from…

15/09/2014 No Comments

Ericsson acquires Fabrix Systems

Ericsson acquires Fabrix, for cloud video transformation. Ericsson announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire Fabrix Systems, a leading provider of cloud storage, computing and network delivery for video applications that today power some of the most advanced cable and telecom cloud DVR deployments. Fabrix Systems further extends Ericsson's leading TV and media portfolio with a cloud based scale out storage and computing platform…

14/09/2014 No Comments

Learning from the best

"Real confidence comes not from talking all you can, but from giving the best you can." Milana May. Who are the best OSS operators in your organisation? How do you know they're the best? Is your confidence in them derived by what they say? Or does your OSS produce the statistics that prove they're the best? What metrics do you use? Fastest to resolve? Fastest to…

12/09/2014 No Comments

Synthetic transactions

"Synthetic monitoring (also known as active monitoring) is website monitoring that is done using a web browser emulation or scripted recordings of web transactions. Behavioral scripts (or paths) are created to simulate an action or path that a customer or end-user would take on a site. Those paths are then continuously monitored at specified intervals for performance, such as: functionality, availability, and response time measures." Wikipedia.…

11/09/2014 No Comments

Redknee signs with Global Group Mobile Operator

Redknee Receives $6 Million Orders from Leading Global Group Mobile Operator. Redknee announced that it has received $6 million in orders for software and services from a leading global group mobile network operator. The orders will support the operator to launch innovative data services and advanced customer care capabilities to enhance the experience of its customers. Redknee’s converged solution addresses the full range of the mobile…

10/09/2014 No Comments

Data Wrangling

"Data scientists, according to interviews and expert estimates, spend from 50 percent to 80 percent of their time mired in this more mundane labor of collecting and preparing unruly digital data, before it can be explored for useful nuggets." Steve Lohr on NYTimes.com. A few months ago, we spoke of the Sexiest Job in the 21st Century (ie Data Analysts), and how there were five high-level…

10/09/2014 No Comments

Touchpoint explosion

"Machine learning is the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed. In the past decade, machine learning has given us self-driving cars, practical speech recognition, effective web search, and a vastly improved understanding of the human genome." Class synopsis for Stanford's Machine Learning course on Coursera. In a recent post, we discussed the complexity of managing virtualised networks. When we combine the device…

09/09/2014 3 Comments

What Telco CMOs and CTOs are thinking

"Few (28%) [Telco CTOs] are likely to involve marketing in their technology strategy or vice versa (20%)." In a report commissioned by Comptel (Executive Summary shown below) covering an equal share of CMOs and CTO/CIOs at CSPs in the Asia-Pacific, EMEA and South American regions. What Telco CMOs and CTOs / CIOs Are Thinking in 2014 from Comptel Corporation Furthermore, the report indicates that 60% of…

08/09/2014 No Comments

Points of OSS Interconnect (POSSI)

"The basic technical protocols that have enabled the Internet to work in such a globally interconnected way are developed and shared openly by a community of engineers." Rebecca MacKinnon. When evaluating OSS tools, I often look closely at the boundary cases... in a literal sense. OSS rarely operate in isolation. They gain power through interconnectivity, through cross-sharing and cross-referencing of information to provide insight. We know…

06/09/2014 2 Comments

Cloudification threatens OSS and BSS

"For companies like VM Ware and Microsoft no-one predicted that one of their biggest threats would come from an online book retailer, yet Amazon Web Services has upended the entire software industry. The challenges for VM Ware today or Apple nearly two decades ago are being repeated in many other industries as competitors appear from unexpected directions, which is why it’s important not to ignore and…

05/09/2014 No Comments

Redknee Signs with Tier 1 APAC Operator

Redknee Signs $6 Million Dollar Order with Tier 1 APAC Operator. Redknee Solutions Inc. announced that a Tier 1 communications service provider (CSP) in Asia Pacific has placed an additional software expansion order, worth $6 million dollars, to support the growth in subscribers and data usage on its 4G/LTE network. The first expansion order for $9 million dollars was announced on June 12, 2014. This software…

04/09/2014 No Comments

Frenemies

"The idea of frenemies – or co-competition – isn’t new to the IT industry as we are in this period that we’ve called the tectonic shifts that are underway. All of us need to be somewhat careful about who’s our friends and who’s our enemies as we go through that period and be as nice as we can to everybody because who’s our friends and who’s…

04/09/2014 No Comments

Only 2 weeks left til TM Forum local chapter launches in Australia

TM Forum local chapter launches in Melbourne and Sydney. Sydney: September, 16th, 6:30pm Shelbourne Hotel, 200 Sussex St., Sydney Melbourne: September, 18th 6:30pm Ether Centre, 265 Little Bourke St, Melbourne We’ll start off the evening with a few words from TM Forum’s Chairman, Michael Lawrey, followed by plenty of networking time and free food and drinks. RSVPs are required by Sept. 12. Please register by contacting Megan…

03/09/2014 No Comments

ITSM, DCIM and OSS

"I like your comparison between DCIM (Data Centre Infrastructure Management) and OSS. Do you see ITSM tools as a 3rd market or do you combine this with DCIM? I believe that traditional OSS will get challenged by ITSM as the telco service portfolio at least for enterprise customers will be more and more dominated by IT services." Great question(s) from a subscriber named Nico Wauters of…

03/09/2014 No Comments

Upstream complexity

"How important is it to synchronize product catalog and service catalog, specifically who needs to master what to fulfill order orchestration and fulfillment processes? Should one be the master over the other? And is it important to have just one Catalog view from an operational perspective?" Great question(s) from a subscriber named Mikey. Let's start with one concept. OSS/BSS usually fail or under-deliver because of complexity…

02/09/2014 No Comments

Spark New Zealand selects Xstream

Spark New Zealand selects Xstream's Cloud-based OTT/TV Platform. Spark New Zealand (formerly Telecom NZ) has selected Xstream MediaMaker™, a cloud-based OTT/TV video management platform for its new OTT video service, Lightbox. Lightbox is a cross platform New Zealand-made subscription video on demand service (SVOD) that can be used across multiple devices, including laptop, desktop, iPad and Airplay on Apple TV. Xstream MediaMaker's in built device management…

01/09/2014 No Comments

Complex management of virtualised networks

"...the SDN idea is to separate out the control functions of the network into a cloud-like management layer leaving network elements in a data-forwarding layer. This means the smart component of networks can be made more efficient and less expensive by making use of the concepts of abstraction, modularity and virtualization that are already common in the IT world. At the same time the basic network…