The OctopOSS is waiting for new business models itself, but also facilitates new business models for CSPs and their customers
“The platform strategy has two key elements, and it is important not to confuse them. First is the platform business model, where companies build digital ecosystems or marketplaces connecting customers with producers of goods and/or services, making it easy for them to do business, rather than playing a direct role in the supply chain (think, […]
In yesterday’s post, we spoke about using OSS to augment intelligent conversations that service providers have with their customers. Today we flip that coin and take the perspective of the customer and how those more intelligent conversations help them. Having spent years working on international OSS projects, I’ve stayed in many different hotels. The ones […]
Have you noticed how the curves we’re dealing with in the service provider industry are either falling off a cliff (eg voice revenues) or going to the sky (eg theoretical exponential growth like IoE)? Here in the OSS industry, we’re stuck in the middle of these two trend curves too. Falling revenues mean reduced appetite […]
Have you noticed a changing trend where some of the largest service providers in the world are reverting to building their own OSS / orchestration (ie writing software) rather than buying off-the-shelf? The trends pushing this cycle are software defined networks and agile development models. In the earliest days of OSS, the service providers made […]
A funny thing happened today. I was looking for a reference to Marc Andreessen’s original, “software is eating the world,” quote and came across an article on TechCrunch that expressed many of the same thoughts I was going to write about. However, it doesn’t specifically cover the service provider and OSS industries so I’ll push […]
There are clearly similarities and differences between OSS/BSS and IoT Management platforms. For example, you could consider each IoT device like any other network device in terms of the provision, manage and maintain process. The only problem is scale – you may have 100s/1000s of network devices, but could have 10,000s – 100,000s of IoT […]
…. but we’ve only just started and we haven’t even got close to figuring out how to manage it yet (from an aggregated view I mean, not just within a single vendor platform)!! This article from Peter Levine of Andreesen Horowitz predicts “The end of cloud computing.” Now I’m not so sure that this headline […]
Marc Andreessen describes platforms as “a system that can be programmed and therefore customized by outside developers — users — and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform’s original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate.” Platform thinking is an important approach for service providers […]
This week we’ve discussed standard operating procedures, dynamic / variable operating procedures and touched on how they impact a future supply / value chain that is far more digitised and potentially has far more actors involved (eg freelance resources). The digital trust mechanisms of blockchain open up opportunities for smart contracts to change the way […]
Blogs from the last two days have covered the dilemma of dynamic operating procedures and why the standard operating procedures of the past are perhaps too idealistic a concept. Despite this, I still try to build repeatability into the various aspects of OSS delivery – initial installation, documentation, demonstrations, training, testing (and regression testing), etc. […]
Yesterday’s blog discussed the importance, but (perhaps) mythical concept of Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for service providers and their OSS / BSS. The number of variants, which I can only see amplifying into the future, makes it almost futile to try to implement SOPs. I say “almost futile” because SOPs are theoretically possible if the […]
Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) have been pivotal in codifying and standardising the use cases of service providers for many years. The theory goes that if you can standardise a process, then you can produce repeatably high quality and streamline it in a cycle of continual improvement. The repeatability objective is one* of two primary recollections […]
Yesterday’s blog spoke of the challenges faced by traditional service providers to simplify their product stacks when compared with their OTT counterparts. Unlike the OTT players, removal of product lines tends to be revenue dilutitive. The other challenge facing the traditionalists is the demographics they serve compared with the OTT players. The OTT players tend […]
In two recent posts, we’ve discussed the changing world order of OSS with NFV as a catalyst, and highlighted the challenges posed by maintaining legacy product offerings (the pyramid of OSS pain). These two paradigms (and others such as the touchpoint explosion) are dragging traditional service providers closer to a significant crossroad. Network virtualisation will […]
“We’re woefully unprepared to deal with orders of magnitude. Ten times as many orders. One-tenth the number of hospital visits. Ten times the traffic. One-tenth the revenue. Ten times as fast. Because dramatic shifts rarely happen, we bracket everything on the increment, preparing for just a relatively small change here or there. We think we’re […]
“Planning is useless but planning is invaluable. Predictions are useless but invaluable.” Scott Galloway. The world of OSS, if it’s even called that anymore, is in a rapid state of change. Business models, delivery models, network topologies, IT platforms, test methodologies and more are creating impacts that are changing our industries and that’s not even […]
The OSS market has two ends of a continuum – one end consisting of what I refer to as “the self-service customer” (ie highly repeatable) and the other being “the requirement of one customer,” (ie highly customised). Naturally there are contracts that fall on the continuum between these two extremes too. The self-service end of […]
Yesterday’s blog discussed the fact that many of the KPIs gathered and used by OSS / BSS could potentially conflict with other KPIs, even when used within a single organisation. It then posed a question: “Have you ever seen an organisation define a simplification metric as one of their highest-profile KPIs?” One of the biggest […]
“McDonald’s hit a peak moment of productivity by getting to a mythical scale, with a limited menu and little in they way of customization. They could deliver a burger for a fraction of what it might take a diner to do it on demand. McDonald’s now challenges the idea that custom has to cost more, […]
When I last looked, Passionate about OSS had been seen from over 180 countries. Many of those countries have probably witnessed the pop-up shop phenomenon. I suspect many have not (yet). For those who aren’t familiar with the concept, it sees organisations taking up short-term residence to deliver customer experience, most often in retail environments […]
