"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…
Read More »"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…
Read More »"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…
Read More »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…
Read More »"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…
Read More »"...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…
Read More »"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…
Read More »"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…
Read More »"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…
Read More »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…
Read More »"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…
Read More »"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…
Read More »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…
Read More »"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…
Read More »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.
Read More »"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…
Read More »"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…
Read More »"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.…
Read More »"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…
Read More »"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).…
Read More »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…
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