Minimise the tentacles on the OctopOSS. Keep it simple
“You and I are streaming data engines.” Jeff Hawkins. You’ll have noticed that I often write about using sandpit environments to trial and refine different OSS configurations. They tend to be really helpful as a change management facilitation mechanism. One of the things you might be wondering is exactly what can you do in a […]
“…the top 15% of today’s residential subscribers in the US are said to account for about 95% of carrier profits! Thus, many service providers are looking to Next Generation Network (NGN) services as a means to attract and/or retain the most lucrative customers.” Joseph C. Crimi in this white paper from Telcordia.* Do you know […]
“The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day […]
“Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” (1) Donald Knuth. I find it interesting that “automation” has become such a common buzz-word in the vernacular of virtualised networking… and OSS for that matter. It seems that it has become one of the primary expectations from any network management project. I can understand that automation should […]
“Central to the work of a project manager is balancing competing demands. The term “triple constraint” is a well-known phrase in project management that refers to the competing demands of scope, time, and cost. The manner in which these three demands are balanced affects quality. If one of these factors is affected, at least one […]
“Managed services are one of the areas where CSPs still hold sway because they are able to provide the diversity of voice, date, video, collaboration, etc and geographical coverage that the niche players can’t. As such, this is a very important revenue source to CSPs where their old cash-cows (eg voice, ISDN, etc) are drying […]
“The only real life is the collective life of the race; individual life has no existence except as an abstraction.” Auguste Comte. Starting with the network layer, each step up the management hierarchy gives a shallower representation of device data, but a broader view of device connectivity. Or as described in an earlier post entitled […]
“We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t a fish.” Marshall McLuhan. If you’re completely immersed in your environment and you don’t push beyond its boundaries, it tends to become invisible, just as water is to a fish. And if it’s invisible, there is no sense of a need to improve that […]
“Real confidence comes not from talking all you can, but from giving the best you can.” Milana May. Who are the best OSS operators in your organisation? How do you know they’re the best? Is your confidence in them derived by what they say? Or does your OSS produce the statistics that prove they’re the […]
“Data scientists, according to interviews and expert estimates, spend from 50 percent to 80 percent of their time mired in this more mundane labor of collecting and preparing unruly digital data, before it can be explored for useful nuggets.” Steve Lohr on NYTimes.com. A few months ago, we spoke of the Sexiest Job in the […]
“Few (28%) [Telco CTOs] are likely to involve marketing in their technology strategy or vice versa (20%).” In a report commissioned by Comptel (Executive Summary shown below) covering an equal share of CMOs and CTO/CIOs at CSPs in the Asia-Pacific, EMEA and South American regions. What Telco CMOs and CTOs / CIOs Are Thinking in […]
“I like your comparison between DCIM (Data Centre Infrastructure Management) and OSS. Do you see ITSM tools as a 3rd market or do you combine this with DCIM? I believe that traditional OSS will get challenged by ITSM as the telco service portfolio at least for enterprise customers will be more and more dominated by […]
“How important is it to synchronize product catalog and service catalog, specifically who needs to master what to fulfill order orchestration and fulfillment processes? Should one be the master over the other? And is it important to have just one Catalog view from an operational perspective?” Great question(s) from a subscriber named Mikey. Let’s start […]
“…the SDN idea is to separate out the control functions of the network into a cloud-like management layer leaving network elements in a data-forwarding layer. This means the smart component of networks can be made more efficient and less expensive by making use of the concepts of abstraction, modularity and virtualization that are already common […]
“Under certain engineering assumptions … the failure rate for a complex system is simply the sum of the individual failure rates of its components, as long as the units are consistent, e.g. failures per million hours. This permits testing of individual components or subsystems, whose failure rates are then added to obtain the total system […]
“The growth rate of DCIM far outstrips that for the datacenter equipment industries and for the enterprise IT segment as a whole; however, the actual numbers are still small compared with other categories of enterprise software (such as IT service management, ERP, databases or security). Nevertheless, the DCIM market is proving attractive to some big […]
“The art of simplicity is a puzzle of complexity.” Douglas Horton. Consolidated service orchestration requires you to solve the puzzle of complexity and deliver a wonderfully simple, repeatable engine for your operations team. It looks simple and it sounds simple, but the following list provides just a handful of the pre-requisite tasks you’ll need to […]
“John D. Rockefeller wanted to dominate oil, but Microsoft wants it all, you name it: cable, media, banking, car dealerships.” Ralph Nader. As a friend of mine often says, “the two most commonly used OSS tools are Microsoft Excel 2007 and 2010.” Whether it’s design packs, address management, joint/splice schedules, asset lists, etc, etc, etc, […]
“A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s not that good.” StartupVitamins. Very funny! I’ve seen lots of OSS interfaces that are like a joke. Some funny. Some not so funny. In general, OSS interfaces need more explaining than they should. In part that comes from interfacing with complex […]
“The world’s telecommunications market with its national fiefdoms, loose market deregulation, over-bearing government regulation and occasional fierce competition lends itself to M&A as a means of growing, and sometimes sustaining revenues, by accessing new markets. Whilst telcos still have cash they are better positioned to buy in foreign markets as their own markets may see […]
