OSS are all about helping the customer in some way
Natural disasters like bushfires, cyclones and floods can have a disastrous impact on the communities effected by them. The double-whammy is that even after the disaster event, entire regions can be crippled for days or weeks afterwards waiting for infrastructure like comms to be repaired. I was recently talking with a colleague, Bob, who helped […]
In the early days of my career, I was the stereotypical Engineer. I’d get into a project, do the best job I possibly could from a technical perspective, and then get out to move onto the next project. Looking back, I unfortunately had blinkers on through those years. I’ve been lucky to have retained some […]
We’ve regularly discussed how RFPs / PoCs are usually an inefficient way of finding new products or partners for your OSS (see this link). They’re often ineffient regardless of whether you’re a supplier, buyer or integrator. They tend to be expensive and time-consuming for all involved. The short paper shown below by Peter Willis, the […]
Earlier this week we talked about the data management challenge being solved, for the most part. However, we still have large gaps in the decision support challenge, mostly because we don’t have tools to help us understand the complex “systems / environments” in which decisions need to be made. I thought the graph below might […]
Report – The Most Exciting OSS/BSS Innovations of 2022
In our last article, we showed some examples of two exciting situation enrichment innovations, including the example below. These examples have the ability to provide really exciting ways to inform and communicate across different persona groups. Becoming more involved in AR/VR, digital twin and NFT / metaverse-style projects recently, I’m finding that there’s a lot […]
It’s said that the best way to sell hardware is to have compelling software and the best way to sell network services is to have compelling information to share. In the halcyon years for the telcos, they had both the network services and the singular mechanism for sharing compelling information. Voice / telephony was THE […]
If you work in an OSS/BSS product company, are you able to guess what percentage of your team spends time with clients (customer-facing)? And of that percentage, how many observe the end-user interacting with your products (user-facing)? There is a really important distinction between these two groups, not to mention the implication it has on […]
When it comes to driving efficiency and profitability in a service provider’s business, I feel there are three key pillars to consider (aside from strategic factors of course), as follows: The IT stack, led by the OSS/BSS The networks and The field services The networks are vital. They are effectively each organisation’s product because connectivity […]
The OSS / BSS industry tends to be quite technical in nature. The networks we manage are technical. The IT stacks we build on are technical. The workflows we design are technical. The product offerings we coordinate are technical. As such, the innovations we tend to propose are quite technical too. In some cases, too […]
Selecting a new OSS / BSS product, vendor or integrator for your transformation project can be an arduous assignment. Every network operator and every project has a unique set of needs. Counter to that, there are literally hundreds of vendors creating an even larger number of products to service those widely varied sets of needs. […]
We’re excited to announce that we’ve just launched the eBook version of Mastering Your OSS. Click on the link above or here to read all about it.
A couple of years ago Mark Newman and the content team at TM Forum created a seminal article, “Time to Kill the RFP? Reinventing IT Procurement for the 2020s.” There were so many great ideas within the article. We shared a number of concordant as well as divergent ideas (see references #1, #2, #3, #4, […]
Back in the days when I first started using OSS/BSS software tools, there was no way any respectable telco was going to use open-source software (the other oss, for which I’ll use lower-case in this article) in their OSS/BSS stacks. The arguments were plenty, and if we’re being honest, probably had a strong element of […]
The first OSS/BSS I used, back in 2000, was built around an Oracle relational database and the GUI was built using Oracle Forms (as well as some C++ apps). The developers had implemented a concept they referred to as a boilerplate. It basically allowed the customers to modify any label they wished on the forms. […]
Yesterday’s article asked whether OSS tend to be anonymous and poorly designed and then compared how Jony Ive (who led the design of iPads, iPods, iPhones for Apple) might look at OSS design. Jony has described “going deep” – being big on focus, care and detail when designing products. The article looked at 8 care […]
“We’re surrounded by anonymous, poorly made objects. It’s tempting to think its because the people who use them don’t care – just like the people who make them. But what [Apple has] shown is that people do care. It’s not just about aesthetics. They care about things that are thoughtfully conceived and well made.”Jony Ive […]
We’re excited to announce the Launch of The Passionate About OSS Podcast. The first batch of five episodes can be found here, with new episodes to be released here on a weekly basis: The Passionate About OSS Podcast The aim of the show is to shine a light on the many brilliant people who work […]
This article provides a tutorial for building Telco Cloud / Data Centre components into the inventory module of our Personal OSS Sandpit Project. This prototype has been a bit of a beast to build and includes components such as: Hosting Services including: IaaS (VMs, storage, network – FlexPod) PaaS (ONTAP-AI a hosted AI solution, hosted voice) SaaS […]
We talked yesterday about the commoditisation of telco services and the part that OSS/BSS have to play in differentiation. We also talked about telcos retaining a few competitive advantages despite the share-of-wallet inroads made by OTT, software and cloud service providers recently. Managed services is one area where some of those advantages converge. Quite a […]
