Minimise the tentacles on the OctopOSS. Keep it simple
Over the years I’m sure you’ve seen many different OSS demonstrations. You’ve probably also seen presentations by vendors / integrators that have shown multiple different products from their suite. How integrated have they appeared to you? Have they seemed tightly integrated, as if carved from a single piece of stone? Or have they seemed loosely […]
“ONAP provides a comprehensive platform for real-time, policy-driven orchestration and automation of physical and virtual network functions that will enable software, network, IT and cloud providers and developers to rapidly automate new services and support complete lifecycle management. By unifying member resources, ONAP is accelerating the development of a vibrant ecosystem around a globally shared […]
We keep shiploads of data in our OSS don’t we? Just think about how much storage your OSS estate consumes. Technically, it doesn’t cost much (relatively) to retain all that potential for insight generation with the cost of storage diminishing. The real cost of storing the data goes a little deeper than the $/Mb though. […]
As you already know, there are two categories of downtime – unplanned (eg failures) and planned (eg upgrades / maintenance). Planned downtime sounds a lot nicer (for operators) but the reality is that you could call both types “incidents” – they both impact (or potentially impact) the customer. We sometimes underestimate that fact. Today’s question […]
When selecting new applications for an OSS or to augment an existing OSS, it always makes sense to me to run a Proof of Concept. But what do we want to demonstrate in that PoC? For me, we want to run demonstrations of the factors (eg features, use-cases, processes, etc) that justify the investment. A […]
“If your partners don’t have to talk to you then you win.” Guy Lupo. Put another way, the best form of customer service is no customer service (ie your customers and/or partners are so delighted with your automated offerings that they have no reason to contact you). They don’t want to contact you anyway (generally […]
I was lucky enough to get some time of a friend recently, a friend who’s running a machine-learning network assurance proof-of-concept (PoC). He’s been really impressed with the results coming out of the PoC. However, one of the really interesting factors he’s been finding is how frequently BAU (business as usual) changes in the OSS […]
A couple of weeks ago, Telstra and the TM Forum held an event in Melbourne on OSS for next gen architectures. The diagram below comes from a presentation by Corey Clinger. It describes Telstra’s Operational Domain Manager (ODM) model that is a key component of their Network as a Service (NaaS) framework. Notice the API […]
A friend and colleague has recently been talking about a Ferrari analogy on a security project we’ve been contributing to. The end customers have decided they want a Ferrari solution, a shiny new, super-specified new toy (or in this case toys!). There’s just one problem though. The customer has a general understanding of what it […]
We’ve heard of OSS being an acronym for operational support systems, operations support systems, even open source software. I have a new one for you today – Optimisation Support Systems – that exists for no purpose other than to drive a mindset shift. “I think we have to transition from “expectations” in a hype sense […]
We all know that revenue per bit (of data transferred across comms networks) is trending lower. How could we not? It’s posited as one of the reasons for declining profitability of the industry. The challenge for telcos is how to engineer an environment of low revenue per bit but still be cost viable. I’m sure […]
It’s interesting how we tend to go in cycles. Back in the early days of OSS, the network operators tended to build their OSS from the ground up. Then we went through a phase of using Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) OSS software developed by third-party vendors. We now seem to be cycling back towards in-house development, […]
There’s a concept in sales called “risk reversal” that takes all of the customers’ likely issues with a product and provides answers to alleviate customer concerns. I believe we can apply the same concept to OSS, not just to sell them, but to design them. To borrow from a risk register page here on PAOSS, the […]
Last week we discussed a sell-side co-op business model. Today we’ll look at buy-side co-op models. In other industries, we hear of buying groups getting great deals through aggregated buying volumes. This is a little harder to achieve with products that are as uniquely customised as OSS. It’s possible that OSS buy-side aggregation could occur […]
Many years ago, I made a data migration blunder that slowed a production OSS down to a crawl. Actually, less than a crawl. It almost became unusable. I was tasked with creating a production database of a carrier’s entire network inventory, including data migration for a bunch of Nortel Passport ATM switches (yes, it was […]
“One business customer, for example, may require ultra-reliable services, whereas other business customers may need ultra-high-bandwidth communication or extremely low latency. The 5G network needs to be designed to be able to offer a different mix of capabilities to meet all these diverse requirements at the same time. From a functional point of view, the […]
“A co-operative is a member-owned business structure with at least five members, all of whom have equal voting rights regardless of their level of involvement or investment. All members are expected to help run the cooperative.” Small Business WA. The co-op business model has fascinated me since doing some tech projects in the dairy industry […]
A recent blog from Seth Godin brought back some memories from a past project. “Two ways to solve a problem and provide a service. With drama. Make sure the customer knows just how hard you’re working, what extent you’re going to in order to serve. Make a big deal out of the special order, the […]
A recent post discussed the challenge of getting a timeslice of operations people to help build the OSS. That post surmised, “as the old saying goes, you get back what you put in. In the case of OSS I’ve seen it time and again that operations need to contribute significantly to the implementation to ensure […]
The following is the result of a survey question posed by TM Forum: I’m not sure how the numbers tally, but conceptually the graph above paints an interesting perspective of why orchestration is important. The graph indicates the why. But in this case, for me, the why is the by-product of the how. The main […]
