The Chicken or the Egg – OSS/BSS or Market Change – Which to Reboot First?
Telcos have tolerated lengthy OSS/BSS rollouts as a necessary evil for years, but what if those same systems are the chains holding the telco world back. Which is the chicken and which is the egg? Is it OSS/BSS and/or the market that needs a radical reboot? Which must be rebooted first? OSS and BSS are […]
OSS isn’t just a Battle. It’s a Quest. And every Quest needs more than Just Dragon Slayers
You’ve already got your dragon slayers. Your team is filled with seasoned OSS professionals who’ve faced complex, high-stakes problems and lived to tell the tale. They’re reliable, sharp, and tested. But if you’re the King / Queen, the one responsible for building the team, then you need more than just experience. You need adaptability. Perspective. […]
From Indispensable to Overlooked and Back: Making OSS Dragon Slayers Valuable Again
Many OSS veterans, the people who built the OSS of today, are no longer being offered full-time roles. Clients often assume they have become obsolete or are simply too expensive. However, these same experts are still solving the toughest OSS problems, drawing on decades of hard-earned experience. They are just not doing it from inside […]
The Buyer-Seller Chasm Series Summary
This article provides a summary of our Buyer-Seller Chasm series of articles, where we start with the guiding principle that: The buyers (carriers) desperately need better tools to transform their operations. The sellers (vendors) already have better tools, which they desperately want to sell. The problem worth solving lies in the extraordinary amount of time, […]
Digital Threads are Re-inventing the Modern TowerCo: OSS, Drones, 3D Models and GTM Innovation
Tower sites / assets have long been seen as fixed infrastructure. Passive, static, silent. But a new wave of tools and novel go-to-market (GTM) models are rewriting the rulebook. The smartest TowerCos no longer manage their tower assets from CAD drawings, spreadsheets and manpower alone. They’re turning each site into an edge utility hub. Dynamic, […]
Avoiding the Dead Zone: The OSS Transformation Accelerator that is Almost Always Overlooked
Most OSS programs stall before they even start, waiting on the longest pole in the tent – production infrastructure – to become available for the first OSS software builds. This invariably involves waiting on solution designs, procurement, approvals, integrations and more. But what if there were a faster way? There’s one step that we use […]
Why Telcos desperately need an 8th Layer in the OSI Model
Telco appears to be an increasingly tough industry. Demand for connectivity continues to soar, yet profitability and differentiation are becoming ever more difficult to achieve. The traditional telco playbook – built on infrastructure, scale, and one-size-fits-all services – is collapsing under the weight of commoditisation and digital disruption. Telco services have never been more essential, […]
Am I turning into the angry old guy who shakes his fist at the cloud(s)?
I know a guy. One of my great friends actually. We’ve known each other since kindergarten – back when we were five years old. He loves listening to the radio and watching old videos. He yearns for the old days – the simpler days, the easier days, the less tech-advanced days. I’ve been finding myself […]
Is your OSS a thermometer or thermostat? 10 Critical Questions to find out
Most OSS platforms monitor, but only the best ones take action. Is yours a thermometer or a thermostat? Does your OSS only report the temperature, or can it actually help change your environment? Do you think your OSS is doing enough? It could be missing the crucial capabilities that power future-ready networks. Below we provide […]
Why small tweaks won’t get your OSS into orbit: 4 lessons from rocket scientists
After working with countless OSS product teams over the years, we’ve noticed one universal truth: they’re all overloaded by huge backlogs of feature requests. But when we saw this image of SpaceX’s Raptor engine evolution, it highlighted a vital lesson – one that has the potential to help guide how OSS development teams prioritise their […]
The two strongest customer acquisition techniques used by OSS vendors today are in serious decline. How to respond?
Yesterday marked a an exciting milestone for the PAOSS business. We made our very first commission payment to an affiliate whose introduction led to a payment arriving in our account (for providing our services). This occasion is far more than a mere financial transaction; it symbolises a significant step in our journey to strengthen our […]
For 50 years, we’ve been building better calculators… and OSS. Now it all changes!
For decades, OSS has followed the same pattern: design, then keep adding lots more “baked-in” capabilities into a complex OSS UI, process inputs, generate outputs. At incredible scale. We made them faster, (somewhat) more automated, and vastly more scalable. But we never made them think. Until now… If… (we’ll come back to the if shortly). […]
Telcos Missed the Cloud Boom – 5 Steps to Ensure They Don’t Miss the AI Wave
In 2010, Cloud was a $24 Billion market. Today, it’s $600 Billion. AI is guaranteed to be even bigger. The AI infrastructure boom is building—and telcos must decide if they’re buyers or sellers. Cloud giants built their fortunes by leveraging infrastructure that telcos helped create. Yet, telcos saw only a fraction of the profits. Now, […]
What Alfred Hitchcock knew about OSS that almost all OSS Vendors are oblivious to
Alfred Hitchcock is known as one of the greatest storytellers in the history of cinema. He’s famous for movies such as Psycho, Vertigo, Rear Window and many others. What’s far less well known is that he very successfully employed a two-script method, which interestingly, has the potential to be applied to the OSS industry. The […]
Finding Your Best-fit OSS/BSS: The Car Yard Approach to Vendor Selection
A good friend and OSS/BSS collaborator, Raman, recently asked me, “Wish they made it (buying OSS/BSS solutions) as simple as buying cars. If I have a budget of $50K for my family car to take me from Point A to Point B, I won’t be talking to luxury German brands, only looking at some pragmatic […]
The OSS Transformation Secrets Tier-2 Operators Use That Tier-1s Ignore
In the telecommunications industry, Tier-2 (smaller) network operators often look up to their larger Tier-1 counterparts as models for building networks, telco standards and operational support systems (OSS). However, and the Tier-1 operators will never admit to this, but the lessons don’t always need to flow top-down from T1 to T2. In fact, the pragmatic […]
Build, Buy, or Blend? The First Step on Your Path to OSS Transformation Success
Are you about to embark on an OSS transformation? It’s a huge journey that awaits. It won’t be without risks and fears either. Like any journey, it all starts with the old cliche of starting with the first step! When helping organisations embarking on their transformation journeys, there’s typically three primary transformation models for you […]
Could vendor financing help to solve an OSS buyer/seller chasm conundrum? (part 11)
We recently discussed how the “Ultimate Game,” a study in behavioural psychology, might help to explain why there tends to be less initial animosity between carriers and open-source OSS vendors compared with proprietary / paid vendors. And like the rest of the buyer/seller chasm series, we also discussed the three main reasons for the lengthy “match-making […]
The Ultimate Game: How this behavioural experiment applies to the OSS buyer/seller chasm (part 10)
Last year, we published a series of articles about the chasm that exists between OSS/BSS buyers and sellers. “The chasm” is best exemplified by the situation where: A buyer (eg network operator) desperately wants a new OSS to improve operational efficacy and every seller (eg a software vendor) desperately wants to sell their OSS to […]
Overcoming the OSS buyer-seller chasm: Using a brilliant ad-man’s perspective (chasm series, part 9)
In our “chasm” series of articles, we’ve talked about the gap that exists between OSS buyers (eg carriers or network operators) and OSS sellers (eg vendors, integrators, etc). The buyers desperately want new systems to improve their business operations and the sellers desperately want to sell the solutions they create. Why then the 18 month […]