The OSS market is highly fragmented. There’s a constant flow of M&A (Merger and Acquisition) projects underway. This category looks into all things OSS M&A – valuations, due diligence, the buying process, strategies to grow, preparation for buy / sell, etc
Everything you know right now, and all the knowledge you have collected over your career, is diminishing in relevance at an increasing rate. For those of us who’ve been in this game for decades rather than years, a lot of the knowledge we accumulated during our “apprenticeship” years is losing its lustre. This is particularly […]
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 […]
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 […]
Do you ever get that feeling that your mental models of the telco / tech / OSS/BSS worlds are different to those of almost everyone else? Do you feel like there are the status-quo approaches that are kind of proven, but still not really as good as they could be? That there must be even […]
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 […]
I’ve spent the last 22-ish years working on OSS and even longer on telco projects. Most of that time has involved way more than the typical 40 hour work week (often more than double). But the amazing thing is that it’s (almost) never felt like it. Time has almost always seemed to fly by so […]
Co-authored with Logan Laux of Verdant Advisers. Have you ever wondered about the process of buying or selling an OSS or BSS company? Are you potentially even thinking of buying or selling an OSS/BSS / telco / tech company? It’s not an event that happens very often, but given the amount of fragmentation in the OSS/BSS […]
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 […]
Like most readers, I’m sure your OSS/BSS suite consists of many components. What if you were to look at each of those components as assets? In a share portfolio, you analyse your stocks to see which assets are truly worth keeping and which should be divested. We don’t tend to take such a long-term analytical […]
In 1998 Berkshire Hathaway acquired a reinsurance company called General Re. “The only significant staff change that followed the merger was the elimination of General Re’s investment unit. Some 150 people had been in charge of deciding where to invest the company’s funds; they were replaced with just one individual – Warren Buffett.” Robert G. […]
“Mike Flint was Warren Buffett’s personal airplane pilot for 10 years. (Flint has also flown four US Presidents, so I think we can safely say he is good at his job.) According to Flint, he was talking about his career priorities with Buffett when his boss asked the pilot to go through a 3-step exercise. […]
“Don’t be involved in 50 or 100 things. That’s a Noah’s Ark way of investing – you end up with a zoo that way. Put meaningful amounts of money in a few things you know well.” Warren Buffett. There are a lot of OSS products on the market. From that list, you can probably name […]
“Now if at the start of the 20th century you had seen what the auto [industry] was going to do to this country, the impact it would have on the lives of then your children and grandchildren and so on. It just, it transformed the American landscape. But of those 2000 companies, three basically survive. And […]
“Warren Buffett has said that ‘leaving the question of price aside, the best business to own is one that over an extended period can employ large amounts of incremental capital at very high rates of return’ and ‘a truly great business must have an enduring “moat” that protects excellent returns on invested capital’. We think […]
“I like to think that if I’d been at Kitty Hawk in 1903 when Orville Wright took off, I would have been farsighted enough, and public-spirited enough–I owed this to future capitalists–to shoot him down. I mean, Karl Marx couldn’t have done as much damage to capitalists as Orville did. I won’t dwell on other […]
“Lethargy bordering on sloth remains the cornerstone of our investment style.” Warren Buffett in his 1990 Chairman’s Letter. It’s been said that 90% of Warren Buffett’s immense wealth has been derived from just 10 deals. That’s 10 deals in roughly 60 years of investing. Warren undoubtedly gets to see many opportunities but only invests in […]
“[Guy]Kawasaki told the audience that this was one of the most important learnings from Jobs: “Price is something you pay on the first day, but value is the sum total of the experience.”.” Max Nyman on the Comptel blog. I recently assisted a customer through a vendor selection process as they migrated away from their […]
“Much of what is called investment is actually nothing more than mergers and acquisitions, and of course mergers and acquisitions are generally accompanied by downsizing.” Susan George. In recent times, OSS has come under increased attention from the incumbent equipment manufacturers for a variety of reasons, not least being their shifting focus towards services rather than […]
“As markets grow, they fragment, forming distinct sub-markets that may break away from the parent market to become sustainable separate markets, with different products and services. Fragments start as small segments of customers with similar needs but for which there is no customized solution available. As a result they do not buy or make do […]
Here at Passionate About OSS, we are exactly that – Passionate About OSS (Operational Support Systems). We’re also passionate about BSS, NMS, or any other names you call the tools that help to operationalise your network.
