OSS are tools that help to make lives easier for CSP users and their customers. Here I present ideas for new OSS tools or innovations
OSS tend to be very good at presenting a current moment in time – the current configuration of the network, the health of the network, the activities underway. Some (but not all) tend to struggle to cope with other moments in time – past and future. Most have tools that project into the future for […]
“Very often, what is meant to be a stepping stone turns out to be a slab of wet cement that will harden around your foot if you do not take the next step soon enough.” Richelle E. Goodrich. Not sure about your parts of the world, but I’ve noticed the terms “tactical” (ie stepping stone […]
We all know that once installed, OSS tend to stay in place for many years. Too much effort to air-lift in. Too much effort to air-lift back out, especially if tightly integrated over time. The monolithic COTS (off-the-shelf) tools of the past would generally be commissioned and customised during the initial implementation project, with occasional […]
If I start talking about doomsday scenarios where the global OSS job industry is decimated, most people will immediately jump to the conclusion that I’m predicting an artificial intelligence (AI) takeover. AI could have a role to play, but is not a key facet of the scenario I’m most worried about. You’d think that OSS […]
There’s a lot of excitement about what machine-led decisioning can introduce into the world of network operations, and rightly so. Excitement about predictions, automation, efficiency, optimisation, zero-touch assurance, etc. There are so many use-cases that disruptors are proposing to solve using Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and the like. I might have even been […]
“The global Internet of Things (IoT) market will be worth $1.1 trillion in revenue by 2025 as market value shifts from connectivity to platforms, applications and services. By that point, there will be more than 25 billion IoT connections (cellular and non-cellular), driven largely by growth in the industrial IoT market. The Asia Pacific region […]
There are so many actions that could be automated by / with / in our OSS. It can be hard to know where to start can’t it? One approach is to look at where the largest amounts of manual effort is being expended by operators. Another way is to employ the “paint the fence” analogy. […]
“For more than a century, economies of scale made the corporation an ideal engine of business. But now, a flurry of important new technologies, accelerated by artificial intelligence (AI), is turning economies of scale inside out. Business in the century ahead will be driven by economies of unscale, in which the traditional competitive advantages of […]
“The myth is that people play games because they want to avoid challenging work. The reality is, people play games to engage in well-designed, challenging work. The only thing they are avoiding is poorly designed work. In essence, we are replacing poorly designed work with work that provides a more meaningful challenge and offers a […]
Being an OSS product supplier to telecom operators is a tough business. There is a constant stream of outgoings on developer costs, cost of sale, general overheads, etc. Unfortunately revenue streams are rarely so smooth. In fact, they tend to be decidedly lumpy – unpredictable (in terms of timelines when forecasting inflows years in advance) […]
For network operators, our OSS and BSS touch most parts of the business. The network, and the services they carry, are core business so a majority of business units will be contributing to that core business. As such, our OSS and BSS provide many of the metrics used by those business units. This is a […]
Tending to be a low-volume, high-customisation, high-uniqueness product, OSS has a significantly different selling proposition than most “box drop” products. Can you imagine if OSS salespeople used any of these “great deal” propositions (as described by Gary Halbert)? “I’m going out of business.” “I just had a fire and I’m having a fire sale.” “I’m […]
We all know the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears where Goldilocks chooses the option that’s not too heavy, not too light, but just right. The same model applies to OSS – finding / building a solution that’s not too heavy, not too light, but just right. To be honest, we probably tend to […]
One of the challenges facing OSS / BSS product designers is which platform/s to tie the roadmap to. Let’s use a couple of examples. In the past, most outside plant (OSP) designs were done in AutoCAD, so it made sense to build OSP design tools around AutoCAD. However in making that choice, the OSP developer […]
“Google has started applying its artificial intelligence (AI) expertise to network operations and expects to make its tools available to companies building virtual networks on its global cloud platform. That could be a troubling sign for network technology vendors such as Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC), Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. and Nokia Corp. (NYSE: NOK), which […]
In a recent post, we described how changing conditions in networks (eg topologies, technologies, etc) cause us to reconsider our OSS. Networks always lead and OSS (or any form of network management including EMS/NMS) is always an afterthought. Often a distant afterthought. But what if we spun this around? What if OSS initiated change in […]
A few years ago, I read a book that had a big impact on the way I thought about OSS and OSS product development. Funnily enough, the book had nothing to do with OSS or product development. It was a book about marketing – a subject that I wasn’t very familiar with at the time, […]
This is the second episode discussing the significant change to OSS thinking caused by modern network models. Yesterday’s post discussed how there has been a paradigm shift from static networks (think PDH) to dynamic / transient networks (think SDN/NFV) and that OSS are faced with a similar paradigm shift in how they manage modern network […]
“There are three broad models of networking in use today. The first is the adaptive model where devices exchange peer information to discover routes and destinations. This is how IP networks, including the Internet, work. The second is the static model where destinations and pathways (routes) are explicitly defined in a tabular way, and the […]
There’s something I’ve noticed about OSS products – they are either designed to be abstract / flexible or they are designed to cater for specific technologies / topologies. When designed from the abstract perspective, the tools are built around generic core data models. For example, whether a virtual / logical device, a physical device, a […]
