OSS flaws
“People are too eager to say “This legendary person had flaws!” instead of, “Wow, this flawed human being managed to do something legendary.”” Mishell Baker. Interesting perspective from Mishell above, one which I concur with. As usual, I have a take on this in relation to OSS. I think we often spend so much time […]
Forward scout
“So I’m going to tell you, it’s going to be a good year. There are good players all over this country, and it is our job as a scouting department to find them, draft them, sign them, develop them, and help us to continue to win championships. So it’s going to be a good year.” […]
Network and OSS policies
“Intent doesn’t change as a result of a link going down, a server crashing, changing cloud providers, changing switch vendors, upgrading firmware or any other change to the infrastructure.” David Lenrow, chair of the ONF Northbound Working Group, who recently hosted the Intent-based Summit, which has passed a proposal to commence work on the Network […]
Great ideas wanted
“If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.” Linus Pauling. I love this quote from Linus Pauling. I see it as an Engineer’s equivalent of a sales funnel. The more ideas (leads) you […]
An OSS ecosystem
“The Biblical world view sees Earth and its ecosystems as the effect of a wise God’s creation and… therefore robust, resilient, and self-regulating, like the product of any good engineer.” Christopher Monckton. Yesterday’s post highlighted Jon Parrish’s five questions for establishing uniqueness of a product. It also spoke of the fragmentation of the OSS market […]
Doing your Goo-diligence
“I now live by the rule of “Goo-diligence.” Whenever have a new idea or am asked for feedback on someone else’s, I won’t move forward without a quick search on Google. I hate to say it, but many of my “great ideas” have stopped before they ever started because of things I’ve found in less […]
Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO)
“The purpose of this white paper is to identify the essential Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) and management capabilities necessary to achieve the key aims of the MEF’s Third Network1. These capabilities will allow the Third Network not only to dramatically decrease the time to establish or modify the characteristics of the end-to-end service, but will […]
Extend and expand
“What the early adopter is buying, is some kind of change agent. By being the first to implement this change in their industry, the early adopters expect to get a jump on the competition, whether from lower product costs, faster time to market, more complete customer service, or some other comparable business advantage. They expect […]
Chief Simplification Officer attributes
“Do you think that such a role (a Chief Simplification Officer or Project Simplification Officer) is justified? If so, what do you think are the essential traits that this person would need?” I posed these questions in a recent article entitled, “Chief Simplification Officer,” so rather than just leave you with an open question, today […]
Chief Simplification Officer
“What simple action could you take today to produce a new momentum toward success in your life?” Tony Robbins. Complexity is the single biggest challenge that stands in the way of us delivering OSS masterpieces. As described in, “The triple constraint of complexity,” the reduction of any complexity should have a multiplier effect towards the […]
The Telco/Utility Model
“Something strange is happening in a rubbish bin in Milton Keynes. On his way to the bus stop, Alex drops a drinks carton into it. The bin’s sensor system detects that an item has passed the top ridge of the container. It sends out a signal that alerts local rubbish trucks. Before Alex’s bus arrives, […]
Where OSS meets Smart Grids
“It’s less about boxes and bases stations; it’s now a lot about software analytics, capability of reconfiguration and all that. It’s a very big shift from what we have seen in the last years.” Professor Mischa Dohler here. In the video in the link above, Prof Dohler suggests there are two major disruptions happening in […]
Homogeneous thinking
“There is no need for us all to be alike and think the same way, neither do we need a common enemy to force us to come together and reach out to each other.” Anthon St. Maarten. Over the years, I’ve worked in a few OSS environments where I had the distinct feeling that there […]
Overcoming restistance to change
“Inspiration is much more likely to develop from the habit of consistently paying attention to life’s small moments.” Robert Maurer, from his book, “The Spirit of Kaizen: Creating Lasting Excellence One Small Step at a Time.” As we all know, OSS projects are a combination of people, process and technology. However, since most of us […]
Jumping into the explosion
“A while ago our world exploded. The environment and the world of towns and cities and families and communities blew apart, along with the world of ideas and information, of entertainment and communication, of politics and diplomacy, and of course the world of businesses and organisations. It’s hard to date when the explosion started, but […]
The end of network engineers (part 2)
“Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them.” James A. Michener. In a recent post, I posed the question about whether we would soon no longer need network engineers. This was slightly cheeky of me. Today I shall note some caveats on posing such a bold question, as well as providing my humble opinions […]
Immunity from the disruption of virtualisation
“Undermine their pompous authority, reject their moral standards, make anarchy and disorder your trademarks. Cause as much chaos and disruption as possible but don’t let them take you ALIVE.” Sid Vicious. In many previous posts (including “A new category of OSS“), I’ve pondered how network virtualisation will disrupt the status-quo within OSS. If, in the […]
The end of network engineers?
“Our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.” M. Scott Peck. I was recently discussing the […]
Intent OSS
“When you hire somebody to cut your lawn, you don’t give them a list of all the blades of grass in your yard and the length to cut each one to (prescription), you tell them to make it look nice (intent) and they figure out the rest. Intent-based networking emphasizes the “cut my lawn” interface […]
Is OSS on the nose?
“Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing.” Paul Theroux. As the domain name says, I’m passionate about OSS. However, I’m starting to wonder whether its reputation outside of OSS fanatics (and there are many!) is on the nose to such an extent that the term […]