Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

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…

22/07/2014 No Comments

“Mastering your OSS” – book signing

Thanks to Evan Linwood for providing a write-up about "Mastering your OSS" on his blog over at ArenaCore.com. He's also included a photo of the first signing of my book.

21/07/2014 No Comments

Google to release SDN management model

"The industry talks a lot about the network data plane and the network control plane, but it tends to hand wave over the management plane in SDN. The management plane is extremely important, however, because it defines how services and applications are orchestrated. In order to run a large infrastructure, you need abstraction. In order to implement abstraction, you need models. Those models don't exist in…

21/07/2014 2 Comments

No one is an OSS expert

"Everyone's an OSS expert, but no one is an OSS expert" Ryan Jeffery. There are so many slivers of OSS. They are broad categories such as processes, infrastructure, databases, network engineering, programming, interfaces, sales, operations, strategy, communications, change management, marketing, services, leadership, field-workforce, products, design, etc, etc. The number of possible categories is huge. But then each category can be broken down into slivers of expertise…

20/07/2014 No Comments

Root-cause isolation and learning

"When you have a serious problem, it's important to explore all of the things that could cause it, before you start to think about a solution. That way you can solve the problem completely, first time round, rather than just addressing part of it and having the problem run on and on. Cause and Effect Analysis gives you a useful way of doing this." Mind Tools.…

19/07/2014 No Comments

Understanding how a lion hunts

"If you want to understand how a lion hunts don’t go to the zoo. Go to the jungle." Sadly, I'm not sure who the true source of this quote is. It's attributed to various people in the advertising game. Irrespective of who said it first, in my mind this quote is such a powerful analogy for OSS product development. For an OSS developer, the only way…

18/07/2014 No Comments

The 70/20/10 Innovation Model

"Spend 70 percent of your time on the core business, 20 percent on related projects, and 10 percent on unrelated new businesses." Attributed to Eric Schmidt here on CNN.com. Yesterday we spoke of the 70/20/10 Learning Model. Today we apply the same ratio, but this time it relates the the principle used by Eric Schmidt at Google to allocate effort (as described in the quote above).…

17/07/2014 No Comments

Comarch enters Brazilian Telecoms

Comarch expands Latin American presence, enters Brazilian telecom market. Comarch, a provider of complete IT solutions for telecoms, announced that its BSS solutions have been chosen by a U.S.-based communications provider for the launch of services in Brazil. The launch, which builds upon Comarch’s already established presence in Latin America, will offer Brazilian telecoms and consumers cost-efficient services via VoIP technologies. Fueling the Brazilian service will…

16/07/2014 No Comments

The 70/20/10 Learning Model

"Michael Lombardo and Robert Eichinger published the data from one study in their 1996 book ‘Career Architect Development Planner’ which revealed that lessons learned by successful and effective managers are roughly 70% from tough jobs, 20% from people (mostly the boss) and 10% from courses and reading." 70-20-10 Forum. Does that match up with your own experiences? Have you learnt 70% of what you know (in…

16/07/2014 10 Comments

Is loss aversion alive in OSS?

"Turns out that most of us don’t like losing. In fact, it’s what the academics call loss aversion. We feel the pain of loss more acutely than we feel the pleasure of gain. In other words, we may like to win, but we hate to lose." Carl Richards here on NYTimes. If you've ever worked at a large Telco, you'll have noticed their ability to accumulate…

15/07/2014 No Comments

Sell to – Sell through

"One of my partners reminds us that, to be a success, a company must not only sell successfully to its immediate customers (“sell-to”), but also enable the customer to sell successfully to his/her end customers (“sell-through”), not just once, but repeatedly. Too often we (as venture investors) see businesses that have revenue traction selling to immediate customers. But, that success proves illusory when the end-customer does…

14/07/2014 No Comments

Designing OSS products by focus groups

"It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." Steve Jobs. The quote above is highly relevant for Steve Jobs' target audience, which was a mass-market retail model where it's simply not viable to design custom solutions for ever customer. The OSS market is vastly different, as there are far…

13/07/2014 No Comments

Simplifying OSS innovations

"It started with ‘What incredible benefits can we give to the customer…Where can we take the customer?’ Not starting with ‘Let’s sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and how we’re going to market that.’" Steve Jobs. Do you exactly know who uses your OSS (not which customers, but which of the customer's representatives use it)? Do you know what…

12/07/2014 No Comments

Huawei rapidly expands consultancy services

Because telcos’ business has become a lot more challenging in recent years, largely because of the OTT players, their way of sourcing equipment is changing. No longer do they simply write an RFP, which leads to a contract and then deployment, said Paul Scanlan, president of Huawei’s business and network consulting group. Paul's group, which has expanded from 200 staff in 2012 to 500 staff with…

11/07/2014 No Comments

Utility business models

"The traditional business model of utility companies is under threat, with a new approach needed to ensure future success." EY's "Business Pulse: Exploring the dual perspectives of the top 10 risks and opportunities in 2013 and beyond." Whilst the OSS technologies remain more or less the same, the business imperatives for an OSS are quite different between CSPs and utilities. The above-mentioned report provides the following four…

11/07/2014 No Comments

The demise of OSS

"Doesn't this [NFV] pose a problem for organizations whose communications skill sets are all tied up in maintaining OSS? The two technologies are not compatible; NFV is designed to replace traditional OSS, not provide a comfortable transition path." Scott M. Fulton, III on Fierce Enterprise Communications. I'd like to throw this over to you dear audience. Does your detailed knowledge of NFV (and OSS) lead you to…

10/07/2014 No Comments

Our profound OSS questions

"I first met him… at a dinner my mother had put together. On my way there, I thought, ‘Why would I want to meet this guy who picks stocks?’ I thought he just used various market-related things—like volume, or how the price had changed over time—to make his decisions. But when we started talking that day, he didn’t ask me about any of those things. Instead…

09/07/2014 4 Comments

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