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
“The industry talks a lot about the network data plane and the network control plane, but it tends to hand wave over the management plane in SDN. The management plane is extremely important, however, because it defines how services and applications are orchestrated. In order to run a large infrastructure, you need abstraction. In order […]
“When you have a serious problem, it’s important to explore all of the things that could cause it, before you start to think about a solution. That way you can solve the problem completely, first time round, rather than just addressing part of it and having the problem run on and on. Cause and Effect […]
“Spend 70 percent of your time on the core business, 20 percent on related projects, and 10 percent on unrelated new businesses.” Attributed to Eric Schmidt here on CNN.com. Yesterday we spoke of the 70/20/10 Learning Model. Today we apply the same ratio, but this time it relates the the principle used by Eric Schmidt […]
“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Steve Jobs. The quote above is highly relevant for Steve Jobs’ target audience, which was a mass-market retail model where it’s simply not viable to design custom solutions for ever […]
“It started with ‘What incredible benefits can we give to the customer…Where can we take the customer?’ Not starting with ‘Let’s sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and how we’re going to market that.’” Steve Jobs. Do you exactly know who uses your OSS (not which customers, but […]
“I first met him… at a dinner my mother had put together. On my way there, I thought, ‘Why would I want to meet this guy who picks stocks?’ I thought he just used various market-related things—like volume, or how the price had changed over time—to make his decisions. But when we started talking that […]
“Action and reaction, ebb and flow, trial and error, change – this is the rhythm of living.” Bruce Barton. I have a really left-field idea to run past you today. I’d love your thoughts about its feasibility (or lack of!). During a major incident (eg alarm storm, security attack, etc) your network health visualisation tools […]
“In the struggle between capital and labor, more often than not capital has won, because the real source of value for most companies has historically been the hard assets that they owned and controlled.” James Surowiecki. Yesterday we spoke of the different types of interface “objects” such as probes, robots, MDDs (Mediation Device Drivers), etc […]
“Just like any product, an open API needs a business justification, user personas, clear use cases, a roadmap, a revenue model, a pre- and post-launch plan, and specific needs in the areas of marketing, sales, support, documentation, and security. These needs are completely separate from those of your core product, though they should be strategically […]
“In today’s cloud computing world, many Product Managers will be faced with the decision of whether to open an API to their users. Open APIs have many advantages, but they also bring significant business challenges. In this post, I describe key benefits and challenges of open APIs, and why Product Managers should treat an open […]
“Regression testing means re-testing an application after its code has been modified to verify that it still functions correctly. Regression testing consists of re-running existing test cases and checking that code changes did not break any previously working functions, inadvertently introduce errors or cause earlier fixed issues to reappear. These test cases should be run […]
“We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There is a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don’t reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.” Orson Welles. One of the holy grails of OSS – automation – has many forms. Whether it is […]
“[Hermann Ebbinghaus’s] forgetting curve describes the exponential loss of information that one has learned. The sharpest decline occurs in the first twenty minutes and the decay is significant through the first hour. The curve levels off after about one day.” Wikipedia. As discussed in Ted Gannan’s recent blog, “Job-related training is an exercise in helping […]
“While humans are not good at processing systems models, we are much better at analysing and designing them. This leads to a natural human-computer partnership.” Mark Zangari. In yesterday’s blog we discussed a lecture by Mark Zangari about Decision Support Systems (DSS). Mark’s quote above is a really interesting one in the context of CSP […]
“Unlike data, there is little mainstream computerised support for modelling and analysing systems.” Mark Zangari in his lecture to San Francisco Uni. As Mark Zangari points out, there are many different tools for assisting our brains to process data (who could’ve missed all the hype about Big Data tools for example or Business Intelligence or […]
“…if you are a mobile network operator today, shouldn’t you focus your energy on what is the largest and fastest growing service on your network, which happens to not be profitable? 85% of the video traffic is OTT and you get little revenue from that. You are struggling to deliver an acceptable video quality for […]
“Big data is currently at the peak of the hype curve, and while service providers can collect more data than ever from many different sources they don’t always know what to do with it. Valuable insights are often missed simply because they aren’t asking the right questions of the right data to generate useful intelligence.” […]
“APIs are everywhere today and can be a great building block of modern applications. But all too often APIs are not truly great. Rather than love your API, developers curse it.” John Musser in relation to this slide deck. Yesterday’s post was about the importance of having an API that’s easy to integrate with for […]
“Remember: An API is a journey, not a destination” John Musser in this slide-deck entitled “Ten Reasons Developers Hate Your API“. API (Application Programming Interface) are the mechanisms for getting data into and out of your OSS. Since an OSS doesn’t do anything useful without data, APIs are effectively the life-blood of an OSS. Yet, […]
When you curate a website / blog called PassionateAboutOSS, it’s pretty obvious that you would see the world through OSS-tinted glasses. The tech-world at least. And so it has been for me when evaluating new comms network / service concepts like SDN / NFV. It’s been a case of, “that all sounds really exciting and […]
