Just being the glue
Last week we discussed whether big OSS was losing relevance and our tools are just operational support systems (little oss). I firmly believe that the future for OSS, a future that already exists in some organisations, is for OSS to produce relevant insights and efficiency far beyond just operational teams. They need to be relevant […]
Smart contracts to get things done
“Smart contracts are computer protocols that facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract, or that make a contractual clause unnecessary. Smart contracts usually also have a user interface and often emulate the logic of contractual clauses. Proponents of smart contracts claim that many kinds of contractual clauses may thus be made […]
The Law of Significance in OSS
“For the person trying to do everything alone, the game really is over. If you want to do something big, you must link up with others. One is too small a number to achieve greatness. That’s the Law of Significance.” John C Maxwell. In the past, national telcos have been able to achieve greatness alone […]
Augmenting our OSS brains
“…the program “The Brain,” in which Dr David Eagleman, neuroscientist, NYT bestselling author and Guggenheim Fellow shared a fascinating but little known secret…our brains are specifically designed so that we learn on the job – by doing. Dr Eagleman explained that this is why human babies do not have anywhere near the survival skills possessed […]
Creating OSS differentiation
“It’s astounding to see the huge range of products and services that are becoming commoditized. Consumers can’t see differences between major brands in most categories, and as a result, many are buying based on price. If companies want to increase their margins — maybe even survive — they must learn how to develop value-add brands […]
Precognitive OSS
Late last week we borrowed from Ben Evan’s three classes of search/discovery to look into what the future holds for OSS. There is giving you what you already know you want (Amazon, Google) There is working out what you want (Amazon and Google’s aspiration) And then there is suggesting what you might want (Heywood Hill). […]
Predictive OSS
In yesterday’s blog we discussed Ben Evans’ models of search and discovery (as follows) as well as how that overlays on OSS: There is giving you what you already know you want (Amazon, Google) There is working out what you want (Amazon and Google’s aspiration) And then there is suggesting what you might want (Heywood Hill). […]
Precognition – suggesting what you might want
There is giving you what you already know you want (Amazon, Google) There is working out what you want (Amazon and Google’s aspiration) And then there is suggesting what you might want (Heywood Hill). Benedict Evans here. The quote above comes from Benedict Evans’ blog, “Search, discovery and marketing,” which I also quoted in yesterday’s blog, […]
How big is too big for OSS?
“This sounds like a joke now – “there was a website that listed every single website that there was”. Yahoo actually worked pretty well when there were 20,000 websites, just as a book shop with 20,000 titles works pretty well. But the Yahoo directory peaked at 3.2m sites and at that that point it definitely […]
lt’s been a bit quiet here
Well, it’s been a bit quiet here on PAOSS in the last week hasn’t it? The new blogs each weekday have been absent. What’s my excuse you’re wondering. Paternity leave has gotten in the way of putting pen to website. That and the sleep deprivation that comes with a newborn. Despite this, I’ve still found […]
Irrelevance
“I have been harping on for years – many years – that the terms BSS and OSS are defunct and should be replaced with something far more generic like MMB: Money Making Bits. You may laugh, but BSS (business support systems) and OSS (operational support systems) are leftovers from a bygone era when communications service […]
Test harnesses
“With everything going towards continuous delivery, ironic how you don’t see any unit test apparatus in the products. Even the new stuff. Asking for a Unit test harness is like asking for an Audi engine in a Chevy truck.” Douglas Stevenson. Great call-out here from Dougie in a comment about why Network Engineers don’t trust […]
Augmented Reality meets Decision Support
In yesterday’s post we discussed how Virtual Reality (VR) can be utilised in OSS. Today we look at how OSS and Augmented Reality (AR) to be further augmented with decision support systems to help OSS operators. As a starting point for this exercise, we have to think about what OSS situations have a spatial reality […]
Virtual Reality meets Decision Support
Have you noticed that Augmented Reality / Virtual Reality seem to be the next big thing lately? Whilst the concept has been around for years, it seems to be trending strongly this year, perhaps because applications are starting to make use of recent technology advances. So where do these technologies fit into the future of […]
Statistical Exception Detection System (SEDS)
One of the many features of OSS is that they’re great at monitoring network performance and alerting operators of any threshold breaches. Initially these thresholds were static. For example if the CPU utilisation on a router goes above x% then an alert gets raised. But this technique has flaws in that there might be recurring […]
IT vs OT tensions
I’m currently working on an assignment where many of the client’s customers seem to have real power struggle going on between the IT (Information Technology) and OT (Operational Technologies). Nothing unusual there. IP networks are already shifting the balance of power further towards IT. Network virtualisation is likely to tip the scales even further in […]
Looking to OSS’s flying cars
Earlier this week we discussed how Peter Thiel’s statement, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” and how it related to the world of OSS. One of Peter’s ventures is the Founders Fund, a venture capital firm investing in smart people solving the world’s difficult problems. The Founders Fund Manifesto is an inspirational […]
We wanted flying cars
“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Peter Thiel. This meme speaks of the innovation occurring in the world of technology. It seems that we are making fewer major innovations (flying cars) compared with the world-changing innovations that are really only minor in terms of technological breakthroughs (like Twitter’s 140 characters). When reading, […]
Open source OSS
“Last week, two new open source groups focusing on management and orchestration (MANO) of network functions virtualization (NFV) announced their existence: the Open Source Management (OSM) group hosted by ETSI, and Open-O hosted by the Linux Foundation. At the press conference announcing Open-O, Yang Zhiqiang, deputy general manager of the China Mobile Research Institute, said […]
Telcos spent all this money
“Telcos spent all this money, built all the infrastructure, hired all these clever people, imagined and planned and consulted for all of it, have all this market power, and they’ll get none of it.” Ben Evans talking about mobile Internet. Ben has a point. Telcos spent huge amounts of money building the infrastructure to support mobile […]