The OctopOSS needs innovation and evolution to become all that it can be
The OSS / BSS industry tends to be quite technical in nature. The networks we manage are technical. The IT stacks we build on are technical. The workflows we design are technical. The product offerings we coordinate are technical. As such, the innovations we tend to propose are quite technical too. In some cases, too […]
I’ve recently been co-opted to lead the development of an “Inventory of the Future” transformation guide on behalf of TM Forum and thought you, the readers, might have some interesting feedback to contribute. I had previously prepared an “Inventory of the Future” discussion paper prior to being invited into the TMF discussions about a month […]
We’re excited to announce that we’ve just launched the eBook version of Mastering Your OSS. Click on the link above or here to read all about it.
I was reading an article by Chris Campbell that states, “In his book How to Rule the World, Brian J. Ford reveals the relationship between sophistication and complexity; what he calls “obscurantism.” In short, the more sophisticated the problem-solver, the more complex (and costly) the solution.“ Does that resonate with you in the world of OSS/BSS? Is […]
Over the next couple of months we’re planning to create a very visual report that highlights the 25 Most Exciting Innovations in OSS/BSS for 2022, expected to be ready for release in early Feb 2022. [Ed: the report has now been released and can be found here – https://passionateaboutoss.com/innovation2022 ] It will include a few […]
A couple of years ago Mark Newman and the content team at TM Forum created a seminal article, “Time to Kill the RFP? Reinventing IT Procurement for the 2020s.” There were so many great ideas within the article. We shared a number of concordant as well as divergent ideas (see references #1, #2, #3, #4, […]
In our previous article, we described five new OSS/BSS automation design rules applied by Elon Musk. Today, we’ll continue on into the second part of the Starbase video tour and lock onto another brilliant insight from Elon. From 5:10 to 11:00 in the video below, Elon and Tim (of Everyday Astronaut) discuss why failure, in […]
Automation has become a big buzz-word in OSS architecture. It’s all about the automation. At face value that’s great, it’s triggering an implication of bringing tangible business value to our OSS…. Except sometimes it’s not. Our industry consists of so many incredibly clever engineers who love solving problems, which is great. The problem with automations […]
We had a planned power outage at our place yesterday, so I thought I’d use that as an opportunity to get out of the details of projects and do a day of longer-term strategy and planning. In the days prior, I decided to investigate frameworks that might help to get me into a bigger-picture and/or […]
The first OSS/BSS I used, back in 2000, was built around an Oracle relational database and the GUI was built using Oracle Forms (as well as some C++ apps). The developers had implemented a concept they referred to as a boilerplate. It basically allowed the customers to modify any label they wished on the forms. […]
We just launched a new video series describing the Fundamentals of OSS/BSS yesterday. One of the videos in the series describes Network Operations Centres (or NOCs) for telcos or network operators. It also provides examples of the OSS/BSS tools and data sets that help to power them. Whilst creating this video, it dawned on me […]
A question came in from a reader this morning, “What is the role(inputs) of the service providers in the research (technology modernization) compared to the equipment vendors and standard bodies (3GPP, TMForum, IETF, etc.)? Do operators have any influence in the research and how the coordination happens (except being the members) between the vendors, operators, […]
You’ve no doubt heard about NOC (Network Operations Centres) and SOC (Security Operations Centres) [or perhaps alternatively, Service Operations Centres], which are the people / processes / infrastructure / tools that allow a network operator to manage the network health and security posture of their networks. The NOC and SOC are vitally important to keeping […]
The pandemic has been beneficial for the telco world in one way. For many who weren’t already aware, it’s now clear how incredibly important telecommunications providers are to our modern way of life. Not just for our ability to communicate with others, but our economy, the services we use, the products we buy and even […]
With well over 500 product suppliers in the OSS/BSS market it can be really difficult to stand out from the other products. Part of the reason we compiled The Blue Book OSS/BSS Vendor Directory was to allow us to quickly recall one product from another. With so much overlapping functionality and similarities in their names, […]
I was doing some research on Ubiquiti’s NMS/OSS tools yesterday and stumbled upon the brilliant Augmented Reality (AR) capability that it has (I think). I’ve converted to a video shown below (apologies for the low-res – you can try clicking here for Ubiquiti’s full-res view) I especially love how it uses the OLED at the […]
In the old-school world of network assurance, we just polled our network devices and aggregated all the events into an event list. But then our networks got bigger and too many events were landing in the list for our assurance teams to process. The next fix was to apply filters. For example, that meant dropping […]
We’re excited to announce the Launch of The Passionate About OSS Podcast. The first batch of five episodes can be found here, with new episodes to be released here on a weekly basis: The Passionate About OSS Podcast The aim of the show is to shine a light on the many brilliant people who work […]
When it comes to identifying root-cause (ie to identify the actual thing that’s broken / degraded rather than the all of the other things that are affected downstream), I tend to think of proximities / adjacencies: Proximity in topology (ie nearest neighbours) Proximity by geography Proximity in time (temporal proximity and seasonality) Proximity by object […]
Since widespread deregulation of telecommunications globally, the passing of data has become a commodity. Perhaps it always was, but increased competition has steadily driven down dollar per bit. It’s likely to continue on that path too. Meanwhile the expected throughputs and consumption of data services is ramping ever-upwards, which requires investment in networks by their […]
