Minimise the tentacles on the OctopOSS. Keep it simple
In recent times, I did some work at a tier-1 telco where an adjacent project was implementing a major changeover of an essential OSS / BSS platform. The old suite is acknowledged as having lots of legacy data, processes, etc. And when I say legacy, I mean stuff that hasn’t been used for years, just […]
As you’ve all noticed, “cost-out” is one of the biggest justification techniques used in the OSS industry. The theory is that if you can automate activities, then you can reduce head-count from the operations team, thus reducing costs. While I’m happy to help customers build business cases around this perspective, I have a slight divergence […]
I’ve recently been doing quite a bit of work (and hypothesizing) on journey mapping for customers of telco services. I had been conceptualising the journeys starting from channels such as a retail outlet (eg O2A – order to activate), from an online store (eg U2C – usage to cash), from an IVR (eg T2R – […]
You’ve all heard of the STEM acronym right – Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. They’re all pretty important contributors to the OSS story. The question however is whether there’s an “A” missing from STEM in the form of Art. Is it STEAM that should power OSS? Let me ask you a question – in your […]
Here’s a slightly mind-blowing fact for you – A child born when iPhone was announced will be 10 years old in 2 months (a piece of trivia courtesy of Ben Evans). That’s nearly 10 years of digitally native workers coming into the telco workforce and 10 years of not-so-digitally native workers exiting it. We marvelled […]
Marc Andreessen famously wrote an essay entitled, “Why software is eating the world,” in the WSJ in 2011, which has proven to be an accurate insight. I thought he was also responsible for the term, “innovation at the speed of software,” but a search only reveals PAOSS and a few other references, so perhaps I’ve […]
Does this clip from Big Bang Theory remind you of any of your OSS colleagues? It does remind me of many colleagues and customers from over the years, but it also unfortunately reminds me of myself sometimes. I’ve been guilty of prescribing the aircraft-grade aluminium when the cheap Swedish media centre would’ve done the job. […]
“Once upon a time I used to think that entrepreneurs had to be smart enough to develop a niche strategy. A nice smart strategy which will keep them hidden from the big ugly and powerful incumbents and other startups. A strategy to extract sneaky revenue. I learned how wrong I was the hard way… Turns […]
Yesterday’s blog covered how exponential growth in ICT industries has been (and will continue to be) a challenge for all of us in OSS-land. We’ve already seen some fundamental changes in OSS in recent years to be able to cope with the massive growth in device counts, bandwidth demands, etc. We’ve seen hyper-scaled hardware/software platforms […]
We’ve all heard of Moore’s Law, which predicts the semiconductor industry’s ability to exponentially increase transistor density in an integrated circuit. “Moore’s prediction proved accurate for several decades, and has been used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development. Advancements in digital electronics are strongly linked to […]
Apart from an obvious passion for OSS (is the URL a giveaway?), I also have a passion for real estate and property development. You’d think these fields are a long way removed, but today’s story ties them together. I had one multi-townhouse development that took 3.5 years in the council approval cycle. The council team […]
Today I’d like to share a mistake that I’ve made over and over again in my career. It’s a mistake I’m constantly trying to rectify, and succeeding, but still failing. It’s not just me either. Many of my OSS colleagues fall into the same trap, so there must be something in our nature that makes […]
Dell sells directly to its customers, avoiding the markups of intermediaries. Dell once diverged from this model, selling through agents, but failed and quickly reverted. The OSS market is quite clearly different from Dell’s PC and laptop market, with vastly different customer volumes and revenue per customer. However, there are some OSS companies that have […]
“Making the business case for NFV isn’t difficult in one sense; we already know that the only thing that can really drive NFV from its current point to early success is operations cost reduction through service automation. The problem for vendors is that only seven or eight vendors can actually provide the essential tools. You […]
AT&T’s ECOMP (Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management & Policy) Architecture White Paper can be found here. It provides a reference architecture and a breakdown of the components that AT&T are using to manage their virtualised network functions. It’s an interesting take on MANO / OSS in a carrier environment, especially figure 3 that compares and contrasts […]
You all know those captcha codes online to prove you’re not a bot right (examples above)? They can be really obscure and annoying can’t they? I contemplated adding captcha codes to the comments section under each blog to prevent the barrage of spam from overwhelming legitimate comments. That thought process didn’t last long though – […]
There can be many parts that make up an operator’s provisioning factory. There can also be multiple different software packages that contribute towards getting an order through the factory. In addition to that, there are usually many different activities that need to take place, some automatic, some manual, some as external dependencies, conditional gates, etc. […]
“Global telecommunications study: navigating the road to 2020.” In the study listed above, executives at some of the world’s largest CSPs indicate that the players most likely to disrupt their industry is OTT app providers. Any thoughts on why they might be perceived to be 30x more influential than technology specialists, or 5x more influential […]
On Friday we published The Simplification Mantra. It discussed the starting perspectives for simplification and that OSS already have so much functionality that they’re difficult for users to navigate. An example that I see time and again is where OSS can achieve a requirement, let’s say designing a service for one customer, but don’t cater […]
When it comes to designing, building and configuring OSS, there is a tendency to have a functionality delivery mindset. That is, if we can get our OSS to meet each functional requirement then we tick the box and move on to the next. There is usually a long list of requirements that need to be […]
