What will you do if the telco industry dies?

Christel Heydemann, Orange’s CEO, brought to our attention at MWC 2023 that a survey of European telcos indicated that almost half of the polled CEOs do not expect their businesses to make it through another decade. That’s a pretty scary thing to think about if you’ve built your career around the telco industry and don’t […]

Closing the OSS Buyer / Seller chasm – More solutions (part 5)

This is the fifth of the “buyer / seller” chasm articles (pt1, pt2, pt3, pt4). We’d previously highlighted the issues, the pain points, the sources of friction and more about getting Buyers and Sellers together to build better telcos. But in today’s article we’ll complete the solutions list that we started on in part four, […]

Network Resilience Engineering: The Role of Operational Support Systems (OSS)

Operational Support Systems (OSS) perform many business-critical functions for network operators, as shown in the diagram below. They are the connectors and the profit engine behind any communications network. As indicated above, the assurance flows help to retain revenues and customers. OSS are an insurance policy for a telco’s brand, or at least the technology […]

The next OSS breakthrough: Accessibility

Our motto at Passionate About OSS is, “Removing complexity from OSS.” Sadly, we’re awash with complexity in our industry. If most OSS were represented as a board game, they’d look something like this: Image sourced from https://technabob.com Would you know how to play this game without instructions? Even if you had instructions, it could take […]

Is innovationism, not capitalism, driving the decline in telco?

It’s a completely silly question to ask you whether you’ve noticed that the world of OSS is changing rapidly isn’t it? Of course you’ve already noticed that it has and is. Do you already have plans to learn new concepts to help you adapt to those changes in 2023? If so, are you thinking about […]

OSS User Interfaces or User Interactions? GUIs or MUIs?

The cool part of this time of year, the holiday period, is that it prompts you to look backwards and look forwards. To be honest, writing articles here on the blog prompts me to do that throughout the year too, but there does tend to be a bit more downtime for reflection around the boundary […]

A seismic shift is happening

A seismic shift is happening that will change the world of OSS/BSS so fundamentally in the next few years that it totally blows my mind. It will be the biggest in my 20+ year career in the telco industry. The following pic is from an IA Summit Keynote by Charles Lamanna, the Corporate VP of […]

How virtualisation has changed the rules for network inventory

Back in the days when I first started working on OSS/BSS projects (the year 2000), I fell in love first with network inventory solutions. I loved being able to pick through all the data coming from various different inventory data sources (mostly element management systems, direct from devices and east-west systems such as service order […]

Automation at the 5G Network Edge

Thought I’d share some information about a 5G Edge Automation project I’ve been assisting with in recent months – in collaboration with luminaries such as EnterpriseWeb (project lead), KX, Intel, Keysight, Tech Mahindra, Red Hat and Fortinet. KX has just shared a blog article, which includes the following quote that helps to summarise why I’m really […]

Drawing parallels between Cloud Native, Cloud Enabled and Data Native, Data Enabled

Just sharing a playful analogy to end the week (and month). Like me, you’ve probably heard lots of conversations that contrast cloud-enabled applications with cloud-native. We’ve heard the arguments that an OSS or BSS application might be “on the cloud,” but not really the gold-standard “cloud-native.” We know there are lots of legacy OSS / […]

Upcoming “Inventory of the Future” webinar

Earlier in the year, Omdia commissioned Passionate About OSS to write a report about the future of network inventory. Not just how the tools themselves are changing, but how they might be used, the new ways of working that will be centred around them, how migration strategies are changing and much more. Now in conjunction […]

New OSS Innovation Video Recording

The \#Adtran #FibreBroadband Symposium was held in Melbourne on 3rd August 2022. This video link below shows the presentation we made at the conference: It’s designed specifically for network builders, to show the relevance that OSS and BSS have for their worlds. It also shows a very high level view of OSS past, present and future – […]

Re-imagining your OSS? Remarkable approaches changing the world of telco

An updated call for innovation in the OSS industry We are currently living through a revolution for the OSS/BSS industry and the customers that we serve. It’s not a question of if we need to innovate, but by how much and in what ways. Change is surrounding us and impacting us in profound ways, triggered […]

The Network Automation Journey – It’s about Culture

I love this article by Tim Fiola, entitled “A Note to Management About the Network Automation Journey – It’s About Culture.” It does a brilliant job of explaining the real challenges around network automation. I’m going to riff off it a little bit today, drawing comparisons with OSS/BSS (which do happen to have a role […]

What is an OSStracod?

Back on my first OSS project – all the way back, deep into the annals of time – the year 2000 to be exact, I was lucky enough to work with a really tight delivery team. We all lived in the same hotel in Taiwan and took taxis to work together. Each morning I’d read […]

How to Maintain Control of your OSS in a Cloud Outage

There was a brilliant article from Matt Kapko over at SDXCentral last week entitled, “AWS Outage Stresses Telco Cloud Challenges.” It specifically highlighted lengthy outages on AWS in December and the downstream impact cloud outages can have for telcos that have dependencies on third-party cloud providers.  “The benefits of public cloud are clear — efficiency, scalability, […]

New report – Inventory of the Future

I’ve recently been co-opted to lead the development of an “Inventory of the Future” transformation guide on behalf of TM Forum and thought you, the readers, might have some interesting feedback to contribute. I had previously prepared an “Inventory of the Future” discussion paper prior to being invited into the TMF discussions about a month […]

How to Transform your OSS/BSS with Open APIs

The video below, starring Martin Pittard, the Principal IT Architect at Vocus Group, provides a number of important OSS/BSS Transformation call-outs that we’ll dive into in this article. Vocus has embarked on a journey to significantly overhaul its OSS/BSS stack and has heavily leveraged TM Forum’s Open API suite to do so. One of the primary […]