The OctopOSS needs innovation and evolution to become all that it can be
Our Blue Book OSS/BSS Vendors Directory provides a list of over 400 vendors. That clearly states that it’s a highly fragmented market. This amount of fragmentation hurts the industry in many ways, including: Duplication – Let’s say 100 of the 400 vendors offer alarm / fault management capabilities. That means there are 100 teams duplicating […]
I’m assuming that if you’re reading this blog, chances are you’re already an OSS/BSS expert, or spend a lot of your working life thinking about them. Perhaps you do more than think about them and actually help to implement them in some way. Perhaps you don’t implement them yet, but have been tasked with understanding […]
No doubt all of you have seen network performance graphs. The one below is an example (from Flowmon 8.03). This example shows throughput, jitter and round-trip time amongst other metrics. No doubt you use many additional metrics to track the health of your network. Most performance management tools show the range of metrics as line […]
As you have undoubtedly noticed, 5G is generating quite a bit of buzz in telco and OSS circles. For many it’s just an n+1 generation of mobile standards, where n is currently 4 (well, the number of recent introductions into the market mean n is probably now getting closer to 5 🙂 ). But 5G […]
“People in a tough spot often focus on their own problems, when the answer usually lies in fixing someone else’s.”Steve Schwarzman. The telco industry is in a tough spot in many areas around the globe. Sadly, there were more stories of wholesale retrenchments here in Australia this week, including good friends. Revenues falling. Sentiment bleak. […]
Following yesterday’s post about OSS Inventory, I received another great follow-up question from another avid reader of the PAOSS blog: “Interesting thoughts Ryan! In addition to ‘faults up’, perhaps there is a case also (obvious?) for ‘discovery up’ to capture ongoing non-planned changes? Wondering have you come across any sort of reconciliation / adaptive inventory […]
Back in the old days, there was really only one OSS build model – via big milestone/functionality delivery. You followed a waterfall style delivery where you designed the end-solution up-front, then tried to build, test and handover to that design. The business value was delivered at the end of the project (or perhaps major phases […]
Imagine for a moment that you’re the coach of a sporting team. You train your team and provide them with a strategy for the game. You send them out onto the court and let them play. The scoreboard gives you all of the stats about each player. Their points, blocks, tackles, heart-rate, distance covered, errors, […]
We talked yesterday about a range of OSS products that are more outcome-driven than our typically transactional OSS tools. There’s not many of them around at this stage. I refer to them as “data bridge” products. Our typical OSS tools help manage transactions (alarms, activate customers services, etc). They’re generally not so great at […]
OSS tend to be very technical and transactional in nature. For example, a critical alarm happens, so we have to coordinate remedial actions as soon as possible. Or, a new customer has requested service so we have to coordinate the workforce to implement certain tasks in the physical and logical/virtual world. When you spend so […]
Geoff Moore’s seminal book, “Crossing the Chasm,” described the psychological chasm between early buyers and the mainstream market. Seth Godin cites Moore’s work, “Moore’s Crossing the Chasm helped marketers see that while innovation was the tool to reach the small group of early adopters and opinion leaders, it was insufficient to reach the masses. Because […]
A few years ago I was lucky enough to be invited to lead a bid. I say lucky because the partner organisations are two of the most iconic firms in the tech industry. The bid was for bleeding-edge work, potentially worth well over a billion dollars. I was a little surprised to be honest. I […]
In a post last week we posed the question on whether Inventory Management still retains relevance. A friend recently posited that inventory tools are no longer relevant. I see where he’s coming from but also tend to disagree (but with an open mind). IMHO There are certainly uses cases where inventory remains unquestionably needed. […]
“When experts are wrong, it’s often because they’re experts on an earlier version of the world.” Paul Graham. OSS experts are often wrong. Not only because of the “earlier version of the world” paradigm mentioned above, but also the “parallel worlds” paradigm that’s not explicitly mentioned. That is, they may be experts on one […]
The following is a set of user stories I’ve provided to TM Forum to help with their current Autonomous Networking initiative. They’re just an initial discussion point for others to riff off. We’d love to get your comments, additions and recommended refinements too. As a Head of Network Operations, I want to Automatically maintain the […]
You’ve all probably seen this scene from the Tom Hanks movie, Apollo 13 right? But you’re probably wondering what it has to do with OSS? Well, this scene came to mind when I was preparing a list of user stories required to facilitate Autonomous Networking. More specifically, to the use-case where we want the Autonomous […]
I must’ve written dozens of posts about us needing to collectively invest a lot more effort into UI / UX. I’ve written quite a few over the last few months especially. This one in particular springs to mind. As an industry, we typically don’t do user experience journeys (UX) or user interfaces (UI) very well […]
A slightly left-field thought dawned on me the other day and I’d like to hear your thoughts on it. We all know that almost all telemetry coming out of our networks is time-stamped. Events, syslogs, metrics, etc. That makes perfect sense because we look for time-based ripple-out effects when trying to diagnose issues. But therefore […]
In yesterday’s post, we talked about what needs to happen for a network operator to build an autonomous network. Many of the factors extended beyond the direct control of the OSS stack. We also looked at the difference between designing network autonomy for an existing OSS versus a ground-up build of an autonomous network. We […]
….I want to make my network so observable, reliable, predictable and repeatable that I don’t need anyone to operate it. That’s clearly a highly ambitious goal. Probably even unachievable if we say it doesn’t need anyone to run it. But I wonder whether this has to be the starting point we take on behalf of […]
