OSS are all about helping the customer in some way
“Sometimes designing is very tempting; sometimes not designing is the answer. Often silence is required instead of shouting.” Karres en Brands. It’s said that when presenting a lecture, the softly spoken have more chance of reaching an audience than the classical loud extrovert. The theory goes that if a voice is barely audible, the listener […]
Success leaves footprints… and so does failure. This statement is probably true in any field but especially so in OSS. One of the reasons I follow the OSS industry so closely is because I’m always on the lookout for clues. Clues that track both sets of footprints to understand why. An organisation that consistently gets […]
Amongst other consultancy activities, I help clients find the best OSS solution for their needs. This means I’m constantly analysing vendor offerings to cross-reference against client needs. Based on this perspective, there’s a question I would like to pose to vendors – Why are potential customers coming to your site? [Note: for the purpose of […]
The first step of the Design Thinking methodology is emphathising (aka getting to know your customers). For some OSS vendors, they overlook this step assuming that they know what the customers want. Similarly for an internal project, the project team will act as the proxy on behalf of a large group of OSS users without […]
… but I will because I’m alarmed. 🙂 The advent of network virtualisation, cloud-scaling and API / microservice-centric OSS means that the security attack surface changes significantly compared with old-style solutions. We now have to consider a more diverse application stack, often where parts of the stack are outside our control because they’re As A […]
“All the technological change in the telecoms industry is pointing towards a more final and ultimate change, the death of the old “telco” carrier model we have known for the past few decades. We have known it is coming but the last vestiges will be swept away in 2017. All telcos will finally abandon “telco” […]
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 […]
No, not “Wow!” the exclamation but the acronym W-O-W. Wow stands for Walk Out Working. In other words, if a customer comes into a retail store, they walk out with a working service rather than exasperation. Whilst many customers wouldn’t be aware of it, there are lots of things that have to happen in an […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
“operators that seek to implement NFV without preparing their OSS to support it are unlikely to be successful in capturing the new revenue-generating and cost-saving opportunities. OSS should not be an afterthought; it will continue to be central to the operational efficiency and agility of the service provider.” James Crawshaw in “Next-Gen OSS for Hybrid […]
One of the things that I’ve noticed when organisations are looking to select a new OSS is that there is a tendency to focus on the functionality. That’s one way and it can be a successful way of identifying the requirements that you need to benchmark against. I’ve also helped organisations with their vendor selection […]
“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 […]
Yesterday’s blog spoke of building an ultra-cut-down version of OSS products to get them in and working quickly. That blog leads into an interesting concept being used in the Agile world, Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) [Hat tip to Scott for bringing this to my attention]. “WSJF is a scheduling algorithm (or if you prefer, […]
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 […]
I hold a somewhat philosophical view of where OSS (and IT in general) fits within its overall timeline. It’s all pretty nascent in the grand scheme of things. Whilst communitications technology is the common thread, I’ve worked in many industries including construction, mining, engineering, government, utilities, emergency services, healthcare, farming and more. Most of these […]
