Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

OSS Supply chain – Shift No. 1

"Shift No. 1: From Cross-Functional Integration to Cross-Enterprise too. OLD QUESTION: How do we get the various functional areas of our company to work together to supply product to our immediate customers? NEW QUESTION: How do we coordinate activities across companies as well as across internal functions to supply product to the market?" Laura Ross Kopczak and M. Eric Johnson in the "MIT Sloan Management Review."…

05/08/2014 4 Comments

OSS Supply-chain Management

"Supplying product to meet demand goes well beyond the question – Did we ship what the customer wanted today? It includes more strategic questions such as – How well do we work with our partners? Are we first to market with our new products? Do we embrace product variety or do we limit it because we can’t handle it? Are our sales promotions creating chaotic demand…

04/08/2014 No Comments

What can your CFO do with an OSS?

"The CFO and his or her finance staff must be attuned to the drivers of the business, and must be able to work closely with operations management as well as with executive management to chart the financial and strategic impacts of prospective growth strategies." CFO Research Services. As we often discuss, an OSS is no longer just a tool for use by network operations. These tools…

03/08/2014 No Comments

CSG International expands with Comcast

CSG International Expands Relationship with Comcast. CSG Systems International, a global provider of interactive transaction-driven solutions and services, today announced that it has expanded and extended its relationship with Comcast Cable to provide residential billing services through June 30, 2019. Currently, CSG provides its end-to-end, pre-integrated customer care and billing solution to approximately two-thirds of Comcast’s existing residential customers. The expanded contract provides the framework for Comcast…

02/08/2014 No Comments

Siphoning Value

"Is your company focused on creating value — or on siphoning it off from others? Capturing value from other stakeholders by manipulating the competitive market process to the company’s advantage exposes a company to reputational or legal risks. It also can undermine corporate values. Value extraction is typically easier than developing a competitive advantage through ongoing value creation. Companies can get hooked on the practice, to…

02/08/2014 No Comments

TM Forum Inform

The team at TM Forum has been kind enough to start re-publishing content from PassionateAboutOSS.com on their Inform platform. Just in case you didn't already know, TM Forum is a global trade association trusted by the world’s largest enterprises, service providers and suppliers to help them continuously transform to succeed in the digital economy.

01/08/2014 No Comments

Backtracking

"Social TV app Zeebox (recently rebranded as Beamly) thought it was doing the right thing by moving from a tabbed interface to a navigation drawer, but the results were catastrophic — customer engagement dropped by half! Zeebox scrambled to issue an update that restored the tabbed UI. A second attempt proved equally disastrous. What started out as an attempt to embrace a widely used design pattern…

01/08/2014 No Comments

What does your CMO know about OSS?

"We were trying to empower the networking people and the CIO in an organisation to add some value to bring to marketing, but we found that getting the digital marketing team or the CMO involved early on makes the sales cycle move a lot faster. And we found that, for a lot of our customers, CMO has more budget dollars for IT than the CIO: for…

31/07/2014 No Comments

The Lego analogy

"Its supply chains were long and expensive – at one stage with 11,000 contractors Lego had more suppliers than Boeing used to build its aircraft! And its product development had become increasingly complex, with many product ranges involving such a wide range of choice – for example the Pirate figures had no less than 10 different leg designs, each with its own clothing – that it…

30/07/2014 No Comments

Ericsson acquires MetraTech

Ericsson acquires MetraTech to accelerate cloud and enterprise billing capabilities. Ericsson announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire US-based MetraTech Corp., a provider of metadata-based billing, commerce and settlement solutions uniquely adaptable to multiple business models and industries. The acquisition includes all 140 employees and contractors comprising a team of highly-skilled software experts. It will further build upon Ericsson's expertise in billing and expands…

29/07/2014 No Comments

Virtual workflows

"The best way to systematize your business is to first do each job yourself. Find the best or preferred way to do each task, and create a system for doing it that way that is easy to follow. Repeat this process for every function of your business until every part is systematized.." Michael Gerber. The Telco industry is built around patterns. Even bespoke services tend to…

29/07/2014 No Comments

Automated design

"...with big data techniques we can start to find out where the clusters of [revenue generating businesses] and where the clusters of bad coverage are so you can be far more selective of where you rollout to." Kevin Noonan. In yesterday's blog, we discussed the likelihood of more OSS vendor suites containing large-scale network design automation tools due to the potential for quick payback periods on…

28/07/2014 No Comments

Automated network design

"The smart way to optimise infrastructure is to incorporate optimality into the design." Geoff Prince. In a recent presentation by Mike Quigley, NBN Co's departing CEO, he mentioned that OSS/BSS gave him his biggest nightmares. One of the NBN Co's other significant problems he mentioned was the preparation of designs to service every home in Australia with broadband network services. Given the size of the challenge, NBN…

27/07/2014 No Comments

Multi-Technology Operations Systems Interface (MTOSI)

"Multi-Technology Operations System Interface (MTOSI) is a standard for implementing interfaces between OSSs. Service providers (carriers) use multiple Operational Support Systems (OSS) to manage complex networks. Since the various parts of the network must interact, so must the OSSs. It is standardized by the Telemanagement Forum (TM Forum). The TMF Frameworx provides a set of reference models that aid in analyzing and designing next generation BSS…

26/07/2014 No Comments

Connectionless technology management

"Unlike connection oriented Subnetworks which often constitute the widespread transport layer (DWDM, SONET/SDH) shared by many network applications, connectionless Subnetworks such as Metro Ethernet are likely to be deployed as smaller “islands” dedicated to a single network application (e.g., multiple sites of a corporate customer)." TM Forum's "SD1-44 Connectionless Technology Management." Many OSS tools that have been around for a while were originally conceived around connection-oriented…

25/07/2014 2 Comments

Sprint Selects NetCracker

Sprint Selects NetCracker OSS to Support Rollout of Revolutionary Sprint Spark Network Technology. NetCracker Technology announced that Sprint has agreed to a multi-year agreement that will expand its use of NetCracker’s OSS solutions to support its Sprint Spark™ enhanced LTE rollout. Sprint Spark uses next-gen wireless technology to deliver a whole new level of mobile Internet experience. Sprint is among the largest telecommunications providers in the…

24/07/2014 No Comments

The first law of holes

"It is a good thing to follow the first law of holes; if you are in one, stop digging." Denis Healey. Unfortunately it's far too easy to find yourself in a hole on an OSS project. I have to admit that I've ended up in a few OSS holes myself. Even sadder, I have to admit that a few project teams I've been involved with have…

24/07/2014 No Comments

Multi-tenancy models

"An empty house is better than a bad tenant." Irish Proverb. As described in an earlier post (High-Rise OSS), multi-tenancy is becoming an important feature for OSS applications, particularly in highly virtualised environments. Aside from the shared infrastructure itself, there are two* key components of multi-tenancy models for OSS implementers to consider. Applications - Naturally, the OSS tool/s must deliver the functionality that allows CSPs to…

23/07/2014 4 Comments

Automile and Telit partner on connected cars

Automile, Telit M2M partner on connected car platform. Automile AB, a Swedish start-up based in Stockholm, has built a telematics platform with the Internet of Things in mind, called Automile PRO, reinventing fleet management for businesses to connect with their car and driving data via a smart cellular based OBD II device, available in 53 countries. Automile has partnered with Telit Wireless Solutions to use Telit…

22/07/2014 No Comments

OSS – the stuff of nightmares?

"For the CEO of a Telco the development of major OSS/BSS capability can be the stuff of nightmares. It was these large IT systems that I most feared would be the bottleneck in rolling out services on the NBN." Mike Quigley , in a presentation to TelSoc. Mike was the founding CEO of NBN Co, Australia's National Broadband Network, a start-up responsible for implementing the largest…