Minimise the tentacles on the OctopOSS. Keep it simple
We’re excited to announce the Launch of The Passionate About OSS Podcast. The first batch of five episodes can be found here, with new episodes to be released here on a weekly basis: The Passionate About OSS Podcast The aim of the show is to shine a light on the many brilliant people who work […]
The challenging thing about establishing root-cause is that the rules tend to be fairly unique to each network. Each vendors, topologies, interface specs, etc tend to be quite different, so they need to be customised to each network. But there are a few rules that can be applied to any network. Yesterday we described a […]
In our post on Monday, we discussed how some commodity providers have a structural advantage through lower cost of production (eg Rio Tinto in iron ore). Telcos have the potential to achieve a similar advantage on their commodity services too. It also mentioned that the first principle behind that advantage is simplicity (of systems, overheads, […]
We talked yesterday about the commoditisation of telco services and the part that OSS/BSS have to play in differentiation. We also talked about telcos retaining a few competitive advantages despite the share-of-wallet inroads made by OTT, software and cloud service providers recently. Managed services is one area where some of those advantages converge. Quite a […]
Since widespread deregulation of telecommunications globally, the passing of data has become a commodity. Perhaps it always was, but increased competition has steadily driven down dollar per bit. It’s likely to continue on that path too. Meanwhile the expected throughputs and consumption of data services is ramping ever-upwards, which requires investment in networks by their […]
Our Blue Book OSS/BSS Vendors Directory provides a list of over 400 vendors. That clearly states that it’s a highly fragmented market. This amount of fragmentation hurts the industry in many ways, including: Duplication – Let’s say 100 of the 400 vendors offer alarm / fault management capabilities. That means there are 100 teams duplicating […]
I’m assuming that if you’re reading this blog, chances are you’re already an OSS/BSS expert, or spend a lot of your working life thinking about them. Perhaps you do more than think about them and actually help to implement them in some way. Perhaps you don’t implement them yet, but have been tasked with understanding […]
Have you noticed the recent up-tick in headlines around telco offerings by hyperscalers AWS, Google and Microsoft? Or the multi-cloud telco models, the middleware, supplied by VMware and Red Hat? Whilst previous generations of wireless connectivity have focussed on voice and data capabilities, 5G is architected to better enable consumer business models. Edge compute (both […]
Are you a bit slow like me and sometimes have to stop and think to differentiate your key assurance metrics like your MTTRs from your MTBFs? If so, I thought this useful diagram from researchgate.net might help The metrics are: MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) – the average elapsed time between failures of a system, […]
As you have undoubtedly noticed, 5G is generating quite a bit of buzz in telco and OSS circles. For many it’s just an n+1 generation of mobile standards, where n is currently 4 (well, the number of recent introductions into the market mean n is probably now getting closer to 5 🙂 ). But 5G […]
Last week we discussed the nuances between Inventory, Asset and Config Management within an OSS stack. Each one of these tools are designed to supports functionality for different users / persona-groups. However, they also tend to have significant functional overlap. Chances are your organisation doesn’t have separate dedicated tools for each. So today I’m going […]
“People in a tough spot often focus on their own problems, when the answer usually lies in fixing someone else’s.”Steve Schwarzman. The telco industry is in a tough spot in many areas around the globe. Sadly, there were more stories of wholesale retrenchments here in Australia this week, including good friends. Revenues falling. Sentiment bleak. […]
Following yesterday’s post about OSS Inventory, I received another great follow-up question from another avid reader of the PAOSS blog: “Interesting thoughts Ryan! In addition to ‘faults up’, perhaps there is a case also (obvious?) for ‘discovery up’ to capture ongoing non-planned changes? Wondering have you come across any sort of reconciliation / adaptive inventory […]
As OSS Architects, we have an array of elegant frameworks to call upon when designing our transformational journeys – from current state to a target state architecture. For example, when providing data mapping, we have tools to prepare current and/or target-state data diagrams such as the following: Source here. These diagrams are really elegant and […]
As mentioned in a post about Service and Resource Availability last week, I do tend to think of OSS workflows around an “orders down, faults up,” flow direction. And that means customers (services) at the top, network (resources) at the bottom of the (TMN) pyramid [see more about the TMN pyramid reference at the end […]
Imagine for a moment that you’re the coach of a sporting team. You train your team and provide them with a strategy for the game. You send them out onto the court and let them play. The scoreboard gives you all of the stats about each player. Their points, blocks, tackles, heart-rate, distance covered, errors, […]
We talked yesterday about a range of OSS products that are more outcome-driven than our typically transactional OSS tools. There’s not many of them around at this stage. I refer to them as “data bridge” products. Our typical OSS tools help manage transactions (alarms, activate customers services, etc). They’re generally not so great at […]
Yesterday’s post discussed two waves of decisions stemming from our increasing obsession with data collection. “…the first wave had [arisen] because we’d almost all prefer to make data-driven decisions (ie decisions based on “proof”) rather than “gut-feel” decisions. We’re increasingly seeing a second wave come through – to use data not just to identify trends […]
Geoff Moore’s seminal book, “Crossing the Chasm,” described the psychological chasm between early buyers and the mainstream market. Seth Godin cites Moore’s work, “Moore’s Crossing the Chasm helped marketers see that while innovation was the tool to reach the small group of early adopters and opinion leaders, it was insufficient to reach the masses. Because […]
The following is a set of user stories I’ve provided to TM Forum to help with their current Autonomous Networking initiative. They’re just an initial discussion point for others to riff off. We’d love to get your comments, additions and recommended refinements too. As a Head of Network Operations, I want to Automatically maintain the […]
