New OSS business models
“(start-ups) have to think about making money. From day one they have to figure out the best working business model for their social business. Fortunately there are a quite a few business models out there to evaluate: subscription, affiliate & referrals, lead generation, selling virtual goods or content, discounts & deals, freemium and … advertising.” […]
What does DevOps mean to OSS?
“The specific goals of a DevOps approach include improved deployment frequency, which can lead to faster time to market, lower failure rate of new releases, shortened lead time between fixes, and faster mean time to recovery in the event of a new release crashing or otherwise disabling the current system. Simple processes become increasingly programmable […]
Screen scraping in OSS
“…the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) is due to hear arguments from Ryanair and a Dutch price comparison business about the extent to which rules contained in the EU’s Database Directive apply to data that is not protected by copyright or a ‘sui generis’ database right. The CJEU’s judgment on the matter, which […]
The OSS canary
“Life for an actual canary in a coal mine could be described in three words: “short but meaningful.” Early coal mines did not feature ventilation systems, so legend has it that miners would bring a caged canary into new coal seams. Canaries are especially sensitive to methane and carbon monoxide, which made them ideal for […]
A drag and drop dream
“As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product.” Jef Raskin. A dream of mine since 2000, the days when Oracle forms were the user interface to the OSS I was using, was the ability to provide drag and drop provisioning of services / circuits. The dream was basically a rip-off of […]
OSS Market Research
“You already have zero privacy. Get over it.” Scott G. McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems Inc, stated back in 1999 believe it or not! Note that I’m not being flippant about privacy, but please read on. 🙂 Today’s blog is more of an open question to you dear readers, which follows on from the trailing […]
Propinquity – part two
“Propinquity can be more than just physical distance. Residents of an apartment building living near a stairway, for example, tend to have more friends from other floors than those living further from the stairway.” Wikipedia. Following on from yesterday’s post about enhancing propinquity between your product and project teams, the second part of the story […]
OSS flight simulator
“Firefighters naturally swap stories after every fire, and by doing so they multiply their experience; after years of hearing stories, they have a richer, more complete mental catalog of critical situations they might confront during a fire and the appropriate responses to those situations. Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better […]
The blame game intensifies
“With the multivendor CSP environment of today, it’s a blame game if there is something going on with the network. Just imagine throwing a lot more vendors and solutions into the mix. Unlike what we have today, an NFV proposed solution can have the VNF from one vendor and hardware from another. On top of […]
Pre-cognitive analytics
“There are two ways to look at analytics in an Operations environment: • POST Cognitive • PRE Cognitive Post-cognitive is focusing your service management efforts on looking at events that occurred in a history after an outage. Post-cognitive is akin to driving down the road while looking out of the back window.” Dougie Stevenson on […]
Jeopardy management
“It is bad enough for a Project Manager when a project encounters a problem – but often that is just the start of distressing conversations with project stakeholders. The key to surviving this mess is recognizing the types of conversations that loom ahead and then avoiding the destructive deliberations while consciously giving preference to worthwhile […]
Mobile service assurance
“To offer true, proactive service assurance, mobile operators must monitor three levels of performance. The first is the overall network and service availability – is my network up? Is this service available for subscribers to access? Second is the actual performance of the network – what is the throughput of my network? Is the service […]
Open source software supportability
“When it comes to software, I much prefer free software, because I have very seldom seen a program that has worked well enough for my needs, and having sources available can be a life-saver.” Linus Torvalds. I recently had an interesting conversation with a very bright young man who is just starting out on his […]
Managing the managed services
“Managed services are one of the areas where CSPs still hold sway because they are able to provide the diversity of voice, date, video, collaboration, etc and geographical coverage that the niche players can’t. As such, this is a very important revenue source to CSPs where their old cash-cows (eg voice, ISDN, etc) are drying […]
NFV is really three pieces
“NFV is really three pieces; the virtual network functions (VNFs) deployed to create service features, the NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) that serves as the platform for hosting/connection of the VNFs, and the management/orchestration (MANO) functions that do the deployment and management. The goal of all of this is to create a framework for deploying service logic […]
Broader vs Deeper
“The only real life is the collective life of the race; individual life has no existence except as an abstraction.” Auguste Comte. Starting with the network layer, each step up the management hierarchy gives a shallower representation of device data, but a broader view of device connectivity. Or as described in an earlier post entitled […]
Software in silicon
“The latest innovation with far-reaching implications for system performance is something called “software in silicon.” The concept is exactly as it sounds—putting software right into the chip for better, even faster performance.” John Soat on Forbes.com. As anyone who has worked with an OSS that has a large database can attest, OSS performance can be […]
Who discovered water?
“We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t a fish.” Marshall McLuhan. If you’re completely immersed in your environment and you don’t push beyond its boundaries, it tends to become invisible, just as water is to a fish. And if it’s invisible, there is no sense of a need to improve that […]
Synthetic transactions
“Synthetic monitoring (also known as active monitoring) is website monitoring that is done using a web browser emulation or scripted recordings of web transactions. Behavioral scripts (or paths) are created to simulate an action or path that a customer or end-user would take on a site. Those paths are then continuously monitored at specified intervals […]
Data Wrangling
“Data scientists, according to interviews and expert estimates, spend from 50 percent to 80 percent of their time mired in this more mundane labor of collecting and preparing unruly digital data, before it can be explored for useful nuggets.” Steve Lohr on NYTimes.com. A few months ago, we spoke of the Sexiest Job in the […]