In recent times, we’ve seen widespread damage caused by cybersecurity events impacting the telecommunications industry. Unfortunately, we’re rapidly approaching another monumental cliff for security of telecommunications (and all the industries that rely on electronic communications). The same cliff is something the OSS/BSS industry also needs to be patently aware of. Traditional cryptographic algorithms, which underpin […]
The early 2000s (when I first started out in, and fell in love with, the OSS industry) saw many Tier-1 telcos make large OSS and BSS transformation investments. Prior to that, they’d largely run their operations from NMS level and/or using home-grown systems. Since there weren’t many existing OSS to unseat, these projects were mostly […]
The airline industry is comprised of many regional carriers. There is no global carrier (although there are alliances). Each continent has multiple airlines. There are also local / regional airlines. Airlines of different sizes, business models and target customers. Different service offerings and different look & feel in terms of the customer experience (CX). This […]
Christel Heydemann, Orange’s CEO, brought to our attention at MWC 2023 that a survey of European telcos indicated that almost half of the polled CEOs do not expect their businesses to make it through another decade. That’s a pretty scary thing to think about if you’ve built your career around the telco industry and don’t […]
This is the sixth of the “buyer / seller chasm” series of articles (pt1, pt2, pt3, pt4, pt5). In it, we consider how to bring Buyers and Sellers together more effectively to build better telcos. We’d previously highlighted the issues, the pain points, the sources of friction, a bunch of solutions and more. The title […]
This is the fifth of the “buyer / seller” chasm articles (pt1, pt2, pt3, pt4). We’d previously highlighted the issues, the pain points, the sources of friction and more about getting Buyers and Sellers together to build better telcos. But in today’s article we’ll complete the solutions list that we started on in part four, […]
This is the fourth of the “buyer / seller” chasm articles (pt1, pt2, pt3). We’ve already highlighted the issues, the pain points, the sources of friction and more about getting Buyers and Sellers together to build better telcos. But in today’s article we’ll explore some possibilities for how to overcome those challenges by building bridges […]
This is the third part of a series that looks into the chasm that exists between OSS/BSS buyers (eg carriers, ISPs, utilities, etc) and sellers (OSS/BSS product vendors). In part 2 we pondered whether it’s possible to target a 10x reduction in operational costs. We’ll take a closer look into what this means with the […]
Our previous post highlighted a chasm between buyers and sellers. It has sparked quite a lot of conversation, which is exactly as intended. In another earlier post about telco reaching its burning exchange moment, we wrote: In a keynote speech at Mobile World Congress (MWC), Thierry Breton, the European Union’s internal market commissioner opined, “In […]
I’m currently lucky enough to be involved in a couple of vendor selection processes where we’re helping carriers (buyers) to find the best-fit OSS vendors (sellers) for their needs. Most start a vendor selection process by preparing a looooong list of requirements. This approach takes forever to write, forever to respond to and forever to […]
There aren’t a lot of podcasts out there that specialise in OSS (apart from ours of course), so I tend to listen to a lot of material from other fields, sometimes adjacent, sometimes not. I’m just coming to the end of this one with Peter Diamandis and Roger Hamilton. At over 2 hours, it’s a […]
As you may have noticed, we recently launched a new report, “The Future of AIOps: A Definitive Guide.” In the rapidly evolving landscape of carrier networks, Operations was and still is, the linchpin of business stability. It’s effectively every telco’s insurance policy. With the complexity of systems and the demand for instant resolution of issues, […]
Whilst preparing our recently launched paper, “AIOps of the Future: A Definitive Guide, ” one thing came through loud and clear from the carriers we spoke with – assembling the skills-mix required to support AIOps tools / programmes. The carriers simply don’t seem to be confident in being able to find, or keep, people with […]
I’m really excited to announce that a project we kicked off in collaboration with Ramandeep Bhalla, Deepak Kakadia and Rakesh Ashok, all the way back in March of 2023, has finally launched. It got a whole lot bigger than I was originally expecting. It’s nearly 100 pages long, well over 30,000 words and over 40 […]
When I first left uni with my freshly minted degrees, whenever I thought of salespeople, I had an image something like the one below in my head. This image might still be true if you’re on the hunt for a used clunker. However, nothing could be further from the truth for the salespeople that make […]
As you will have seen in recent articles, we’re due to release our latest report in a couple of weeks. It’s called, “AIOps of the Future.” During discussions with various people during the preparation of this report, we’ve noticed that some people believe they will get a silver bullet that will resolve most network events […]
With our latest report, “AIOps of the Future: A Definitive Guide” tentatively penciled in for launch in 2 weeks from today, I thought I’d share a concept that kept coming through loud and clear from AIOps vendors and buyers alike – Get the data right! Especially cross-domain data! This has always been true in the […]
Many of the readers of this blog veer towards the technical side of OSS (that includes me too) and therefore we could all do well to consider the old phrase, “Sell the destination, not the transportation.” The phrase originally suggests that a salesperson should highlight the incredible experiences waiting for the prospective traveler in Paris, […]
Large carriers (let’s call them T1’s) tend to approach OSS procurement projects very differently from small to medium sized carriers (let’s call them T2’s). This is mostly driven by budget, or more to the point, how the budget frames the thinking. We’ll also show you how drawing on ideas from the T2 approach can actually […]
I really enjoy the musings of Jason Fried. He blogs over here at 37signals, has written books such as “Re-work” and runs a successful (bootstrapped) software company. I enjoy his musings because they take a much more pragmatic and balanced look at the worlds of software development and business than most. Let’s look at his […]
