Sometimes an OSS budget is too big

Wait, “What??” I hear you ask! No it can’t. Have you ever worked on a BIG OSS project? One where the budget is in the hundreds of millions of dollars? Or even tens of millions of dollars? Have those big projects delivered your best transformation outcomes? Or have other projects, with more constrained budgets, been […]

What can OSS learn from Google and ChatGPT?

There were plenty of search engines before Google came along and grabbed a lot of the search market share. There were plenty of generative AI solutions before ChatGPT appeared and created a large amount of buzz too. The question is why did they grab attention / users and what can we learn from that to […]

How to revolutionise telco Customer Satisfaction via an OSS-led Mindset Shift

Just a word of warning. This article is quite long. However, it contains a message that I feel really strongly about…. as you’ll see. Change is a funny thing. Sometimes we love it. Sometimes we hate it. Sometimes we’re inspired by it. Sometimes we’re in fear of it. Sometimes we know we desperately need to change, […]

What changes would you implement to make the OSS/BSS industry more valuable?

How valuable is the OSS / BSS industry do you think? How would you measure it? How would the market measure it? Have you ever pondered these questions? By extension, have you also wondered how to make it more valuable? Or perhaps how to make certain players within it more valuable? If you have, would […]

Is innovationism, not capitalism, driving the decline in telco?

It’s a completely silly question to ask you whether you’ve noticed that the world of OSS is changing rapidly isn’t it? Of course you’ve already noticed that it has and is. Do you already have plans to learn new concepts to help you adapt to those changes in 2023? If so, are you thinking about […]

OSS User Interfaces or User Interactions? GUIs or MUIs?

The cool part of this time of year, the holiday period, is that it prompts you to look backwards and look forwards. To be honest, writing articles here on the blog prompts me to do that throughout the year too, but there does tend to be a bit more downtime for reflection around the boundary […]

The tree analogy – a tale of two eras of telco business models

With the holidays almost upon us in many parts of the world, I thought I’d share an analogy. Like many analogies, it’s a bit oversimplified. It’s also possibly a bit inflammatory in some circles. Hopefully though, it gives a different frame of reference for how the telco business model has changed over the years. More […]

A seismic shift is happening

A seismic shift is happening that will change the world of OSS/BSS so fundamentally in the next few years that it totally blows my mind. It will be the biggest in my 20+ year career in the telco industry. The following pic is from an IA Summit Keynote by Charles Lamanna, the Corporate VP of […]

Automation at the 5G Network Edge

Thought I’d share some information about a 5G Edge Automation project I’ve been assisting with in recent months – in collaboration with luminaries such as EnterpriseWeb (project lead), KX, Intel, Keysight, Tech Mahindra, Red Hat and Fortinet. KX has just shared a blog article, which includes the following quote that helps to summarise why I’m really […]

There’s no competition for OSS cookbooks making food out of soccer balls

Seth Godin recently wrote a brilliant article that describes the craziness of seeking a market with no competition. In entirety, his article goes like this: “There’s no competition for cookbooks on making food out of soccer balls and hockey pucks. There’s no competition for software that charges you to find out the temperature on Mars. There’s no […]

Exciting week for augmented ways of working in telco

Last week was kind of exciting (and a bit manic!). As well as working on a tech due-diligence (DD) and an important client OSS/BSS roadmap, I had the chance to witness some important steps in the progression on telco Augmented Reality (AR) use-cases. On the software side, we already have many exciting use-cases lining up […]

Telecom and OSS has a talent and diversity problem. Or does it?

“The telecom industry is hurtling towards a staffing and skills precipice at a frightening pace, and truly embracing diversity and inclusion in recruitment and human resources strategies looks to be the only way to avoid a calamity, a somewhat sombre Keri Gilder [CEO of Colt Technology Services, a UK-based telco] told attendees here [at TM […]

Upcoming “Inventory of the Future” webinar

Earlier in the year, Omdia commissioned Passionate About OSS to write a report about the future of network inventory. Not just how the tools themselves are changing, but how they might be used, the new ways of working that will be centred around them, how migration strategies are changing and much more. Now in conjunction […]

When disaster events call for flying COWs

Natural disasters like bushfires, cyclones and floods can have a disastrous impact on the communities effected by them. The double-whammy is that even after the disaster event, entire regions can be crippled for days or weeks afterwards waiting for infrastructure like comms to be repaired. I was recently talking with a colleague, Bob, who helped […]

Passive devices don’t ping…. Or do they?

As we all know, data quality can be a big problem for OSS, at almost every operator around the world. A lot of this problem stems from the fact that most telcos have a lot of passive infrastructure / objects in their networks. Passive devices don’t tend to have programmatic interfaces that allows for current […]

New OSS Innovation Video Recording

The \#Adtran #FibreBroadband Symposium was held in Melbourne on 3rd August 2022. This video link below shows the presentation we made at the conference: It’s designed specifically for network builders, to show the relevance that OSS and BSS have for their worlds. It also shows a very high level view of OSS past, present and future – […]

How AI and blast radii could inspire next-gen OSS designs

Artificial Intelligence is purported to be the panacea for so many high-volume factors within telco. For example, AI is being used for complex pattern recognition using diverse signal streams like churn reduction. AIOps solutions are making great strides to reducing noise within alarm / event lists, filtering and automating, to limit the number of decisions […]