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
You’re probably aware that our OSS and/or underlying EMS/NMS have been assisting organisations with their governance, regulatory and compliance (GRC) requirements for some time. Our OSS have provided tools that automatically enforce and validate compliance against configuration policies. Naturally, network virtualisation and network as a service (NaaS) offerings are going to place an increased dependence […]
“It might be the ultimate entrepreneurialc superpower – the ability to shift perspective and understand the viewpoint of another person… whether it’s a client, prospect, or team member. If you can put yourself in someone else’s shoes, it’s the shortest path to influence, collaboration, communication, and connection.” Jeff Walker. Can OSS (or at least their […]
“Don’t be involved in 50 or 100 things. That’s a Noah’s Ark way of investing – you end up with a zoo that way. Put meaningful amounts of money in a few things you know well.” Warren Buffett. There are a lot of OSS products on the market. From that list, you can probably name […]
“Some vertical markets or segments where it’s logical for telcos to enter and compete are quickly becoming crowded. Smart homes, for example, are also drawing investment from cable TV providers, home security ?rms, mobile device manufacturers and other tech behemoths, including Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. However, telcos tend to focus too heavily on vertical […]
“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 […]
“The design not only determines uses, it’s also determined by users.” Karres en Brands. Designing an OSS, or updating the design of an existing one, can be challenging for the reason that user experience is so subjective. You think your design is practical, intuitive, elegant and simple, but others may have a vastly different opinion. […]
“When the dollar was the currency in the twentieth century, banks made a fortune by selling trust. If data is the new currency, who’s going to sell trust in the twenty-first century?” Anthony Behan on TM Forum’s Inform. Anthony also states in his blockchain-centric article, “The telco has a trusted position – even more trusted […]
This recent news brief relating to the AT&T ICE program reminded me to write an article on the standardisation of southbound interfaces. As Chris Rice SVP of AT&T Labs’ Domain 2.0 Architecture and Design stated in reference to certification of VNFs, “Unfortunately, you can get a lot of snowflakes — VNFs that are totally unique […]
Digitisation spawned a new word – omnichannel. It’s a brilliant concept as it taps into the fact that different customers like to reach you (or be reached by you )via different channels, be that email, social, online, livechat, apps, SMS, podcasts, etc. It’s gives them the choice to connect via the method they’re most comfortable […]
“The amount of data that enterprises are storing and managing is growing rapidly – various industry estimates indicate that data volume is doubling every 2-3 years. The rapid growth of data presents daunting challenges for IT, both in cost and performance. Although the cost of storage keeps declining, fast-growing data volumes make storage one of […]
“As Chaney Ojinnaka wrote, IoT (Internet of Things) needs AI (Artificial Intelligence). But on the flipside, AI also needs IoT to grow its awareness and understanding of the world. According to Christof Koch, a leading brain researcher at Seattle’s Allen Institute, “Consciousness is a property of matter, like mass or energy.” He says that a […]
OSS has a bad name in certain circles (usually for failing to deliver on time / cost / functionality or being timely / costly to enhance). Despite all those factors, the real root-cause is almost always complexity (see here for a description of the triple constraint of OSS). But it’s not just internal factors that […]
“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, […]
“I first came across the phrase “strong convictions, weakly held” through Marc Andreessen, but a bit of Googling showed me it was originally coined by Paul Saffo, then Director of the Palo Alto Institute for the Future. According to this post he advised his people to think this way for three reasons: •It is the […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
