Minimise the tentacles on the OctopOSS. Keep it simple
“For more than a century, economies of scale made the corporation an ideal engine of business. But now, a flurry of important new technologies, accelerated by artificial intelligence (AI), is turning economies of scale inside out. Business in the century ahead will be driven by economies of unscale, in which the traditional competitive advantages of […]
“Many systems are moving beyond simple virtualization and are being run on dynamic private or even public clouds. CSPs will migrate many to hybrid clouds because of concerns about data security and regulations on where data are stored and processed. We believe that over the next 15 years, nearly all software systems will migrate to […]
“In 1972, the Club of Rome in its report The Limits to Growth predicted a steadily increasing demand for material as both economies and populations grew. The report predicted that continually increasing resource demand would eventually lead to an abrupt economic collapse. Studies on material use and economic growth show instead that society is gaining […]
“Skills multiply labors by two, five, 10, 50, 100 times. You can chop a tree down with a hammer, but it takes about 30 days. That’s called labor. But if you trade the hammer in for an ax, you can chop the tree down in about 30 minutes. What’s the difference in 30 days and […]
You’re probably familiar with strangler figs, which grow on a host tree, often resulting in the eventual death of the host. You’re probably less familiar with the strangler fig analogy as an OSS transformation or cutover model. The concept is that there is a “host tree” (ie legacy system) that needs to be obsoleted and […]
I recently had something of a perspective-flip moment in relation to automation within the realm of OSS. In the past, I’ve tended to tackle the automation challenge from the perspective of applying automated / scripted responses to tasks that are done manually via the OSS. But it’s dawned on me that I have it around […]
This is the third in a series describing the process of finding the right OSS solution for your specific needs and getting estimated pricing to help you build a business case. The first post described the overall OSS selection process we use. The second described the way we poll the market and prepare a short-list […]
In yesterday’s post, we talked about how to estimate OSS pricing. One of the key pillars of the approach was to first identify a short-list of vendors / integrators best-suited to implementing your specific OSS, then working closely with them to construct a pricing model. Finding the right vendor / integrator can be a complex […]
For network operators, our OSS and BSS touch most parts of the business. The network, and the services they carry, are core business so a majority of business units will be contributing to that core business. As such, our OSS and BSS provide many of the metrics used by those business units. This is a […]
We all know the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears where Goldilocks chooses the option that’s not too heavy, not too light, but just right. The same model applies to OSS – finding / building a solution that’s not too heavy, not too light, but just right. To be honest, we probably tend to […]
One of the challenges facing OSS / BSS product designers is which platform/s to tie the roadmap to. Let’s use a couple of examples. In the past, most outside plant (OSP) designs were done in AutoCAD, so it made sense to build OSP design tools around AutoCAD. However in making that choice, the OSP developer […]
“Google has started applying its artificial intelligence (AI) expertise to network operations and expects to make its tools available to companies building virtual networks on its global cloud platform. That could be a troubling sign for network technology vendors such as Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC), Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. and Nokia Corp. (NYSE: NOK), which […]
“The actions taken by the telecom industry have mostly been around cost cutting, both in terms of opex and capex, and that has not resulted in breaking the curve. Too few activities has been centered around revenue growth, such as focused activities in personalization, customer experience, segmentation, targeted offerings that become part of or drive […]
Just wondering – do you think there would be any correlation between the number of fall-outs through an OSS/BSS stack and the level of security on a network? In theory, they are quite separate. NetOps and SecOps are usually completely separate units, use different thinking models, don’t rely on common tools (apart from the network […]
In a recent post, we described how changing conditions in networks (eg topologies, technologies, etc) cause us to reconsider our OSS. Networks always lead and OSS (or any form of network management including EMS/NMS) is always an afterthought. Often a distant afterthought. But what if we spun this around? What if OSS initiated change in […]
This is the second episode discussing the significant change to OSS thinking caused by modern network models. Yesterday’s post discussed how there has been a paradigm shift from static networks (think PDH) to dynamic / transient networks (think SDN/NFV) and that OSS are faced with a similar paradigm shift in how they manage modern network […]
There’s something I’ve noticed about OSS products – they are either designed to be abstract / flexible or they are designed to cater for specific technologies / topologies. When designed from the abstract perspective, the tools are built around generic core data models. For example, whether a virtual / logical device, a physical device, a […]
The video below has been doing the rounds on LinkedIn lately. What is your key takeaway from the video? Most would say the perfection, but for me, the perfection was a result of the hand-offs, which were almost immediate and precise, putting team-mates into better position. The final shot didn’t need the brilliance of a […]
“Brand, marketing, pricing and sales were seen as sexy. Networks and IT were the geeks no one seemed to speak to or care about. … This isolation and excommunication of our technical team had created an environment of disillusion. If you wanted something done the answer was mostly ‘No – we have no budget and […]
Hands up if you’re old enough to remember ATM here? And I don’t mean the type of ATM that sits on the side of a building dispensing cash – no I mean Asynchronous Transfer Mode. For those who aren’t familiar with ATM, a little background. ATM was THE telco-grade packet-switching technology of choice for most […]
