Engaging with customers
“One of the main assets that CSPs have is their customer base but when you compare the level of engagement a CSP has with its customers, compared to a say, Facebook or LinkedIn, there’s no comparison. Is it fair to say that CSPs are not engaging with their customer base and therefore are at risk […]
Valuable OSS – my new eBook
I’m pleased to announce the arrival of my latest publication, an eBook entitled, “Valuable OSS – Delivering a Return on Your Investment in Operational Support Systems (OSS).” You can grab it for free until 25 July 2015 via the link above or by clicking on the image below-right. Also keep your eye out for another […]
Darwinian OSS
“In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” Charles Darwin. An interesting thing happened when looking up the quote for this blog. The quote I was going to use was never actually spoken/written by Charles Darwin, even though it is perhaps the quote […]
Lowering the cost point of processing
“Why do we have to end up processing packets in four or five different locations for different functions? That doesn’t make any sense at all. Connectem consolidates packet gateway functions to process each packet just once, which is much more efficient. This is going to be important as the world moves toward IoT because the […]
How can I add value to you?
Today’s blog is all about you (actually they all have you in mind collectively, but this one encourages you to voice your specific obstacles to progress). In the world of OSS (or perhaps even beyond), what value can I add that goes beyond the generalities of a blog and will help you get what you […]
OSS ROIC (part 4) – The technology dilemma
“In our company there’s still a bit of the ‘build and customers will come’ mentality, but those days are gone. If we build the wrong thing in the wrong place or at the wrong price, the customers won’t follow. So, rather than letting technology drive our capex decisions, we need to adopt a more commercial […]
OSS ROIC (part 3) – Four divergent solutions
“As Figure 1 (below) shows, global capex levels have soared from just over US$50 billion to about US$325 billion in real terms over the past 30 years…Yet this massive investment isn’t producing the returns the industry requires… the telecoms industry is at an inflexion point. It’s spending lots of money on new infrastructure, but it’s […]
OSS – the afterthought
“Thomas Edison devoted ten years and all of his money to developing the nickel alkaline storage battery at a time when he was almost penniless. Through that period of time, his record and film production company was supporting the storage battery effort. Then one night the terrifying cry of ‘Fire’ echoed through the film plant. […]
Over-the-horizon view of OSS
“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.” J.R.R. Tolkien. As reported last week, my latest publication (The Changing Landscape of OSS) was launched. When approached about writing a report about next generation […]
The Changing Landscape of OSS
The Changing Landscape of Operational Support Systems (OSS): Technologies, Solutions, and Organizational Impacts I’m proud to announce that my latest publication has been released today. Click on the image (or here) to find out more about the document published in conjunction with Mind Commerce. Operational Support Systems (OSS) are the essential set of tools required […]
Hard!
“With more success comes greater problems along with greater ability to solve them.” Mark Victor Hansen. Paul Graham’s essays are a great read. There is something unique about the way he views his subject matter (usually startups) and then has the ability to break it down into highly insightful chunks of wisdom for his readers […]
Automating the Work of Hundreds
“Today, the FBAR service [Facebook Auto-Remediation] is developed and maintained by two full time engineers, but according to the most recent metrics, it’s doing the work of approximately 200 full time system administrators. FBAR now manages more than 50% of the Facebook infrastructure and we’ve found that services have dramatic increases in reliability when they […]
Technology provides no benefits of its own
“Technology provides no benefits of its own; it is the application of technology to business opportunities that produces ROI.” Robert McDowell. Let’s have a look at the quote above in the context of CSP service offerings, technology delivery methods and customer experiences. Let’s start with POTS – Plain Old Telephony Service. The customer experience (ie […]
The flexibility of vCPE
“Virtual CPE (vCPE) is an alternative way of delivering broadband services to subscribers where most of the CPE functions are pulled in to the operator’s network and located near the service edge. In the new network architecture, the CPE acts as a simple Layer-2 forwarding device that helps a business or residential subscriber to connect […]
Rocker Docker Containers
“While its [Docker] use (superficially) resembles that of virtual machines, it is much more lightweight as it operates at the level of a single process (rather than an emulation of an entire OS layer). This also allows it to start almost instantly, require very little resources and hence permits an order of magnitude more deployments […]
The death of fibre
“It turns out that all Netflix streaming peak on Saturday night can fit inside a single fiber optic, which is the size of one human hair.” Reed Hastings. Whilst futurists talk about advances in wireless technology being the death of fibre, higher volumes of wireless traffic equals a larger number of fibre backhaul points… for […]
Network and OSS policies
“Intent doesn’t change as a result of a link going down, a server crashing, changing cloud providers, changing switch vendors, upgrading firmware or any other change to the infrastructure.” David Lenrow, chair of the ONF Northbound Working Group, who recently hosted the Intent-based Summit, which has passed a proposal to commence work on the Network […]
Containerised OSS
“You can think of Docker [a container technology] as a shipping container for the online universe, a tool that lets developers neatly package software and move it from machine to machine. Today, when running large online applications such as a Google or a Twitter or a Facebook, developers and businesses often spread software across dozens, […]
Telefónica releases OpenMANO NFV
Telefónica NFV reference lab releases OpenMANO NFV orchestration stack. Telefónica has released its OpenMANO NFV orchestration stack to open source community of developers through GitHub portal. OpenMANO is an open source project that provides a practical realization of the Management and Orchestration reference architecture (NFV MANO), currently under ETSI’s NFV ISG standardization. Today, the stack […]
Network virtualisation, security and OSS
“Security experts are such a cheery lot. They’ll usually tell you you’re doing everything wrong and that we’re all doomed.” Craig Matsumoto in an article here. I don’t profess to be a network security expert, but I can’t help but thinking that network virtualisation will bring security and OSS experts far closer together than ever […]