Network virtualisation is going to continue to have a major influence on the evolution of OSS. It’s going to be exciting to watch it all unfold.
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 […]
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 […]
A regular reader of the PAOSS blog recently wrote, “I follow with passion your blog,latest post about Inventory are great [Ed. the reader is talking about this post about LNI and PNI and this one about Inventory vs Asset vs CMDB Management]. I ask you if possible have a post on Inside Plant vs Outside […]
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 […]
We recently discussed the differences between PNI (Physical Network Inventory) and LNI (Logical Network Inventory) solutions that appear as part of many OSS (Operational Support System) stacks. As promised, today we’ll talk about the subtle differences between: Network Inventory Management Systems Asset Management Systems and Configuration Management Databases (CMDB) We even discuss: Virtual Infrastructure (VIM) […]
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 […]
After reading other recent posts such as “Orders Down, Faults Up” and “How is OSS/BSS service and resource availability supposed to work?” an avid reader of the PAOSS blog posed the following brilliant question: “Do you have any thoughts on geospatial vs non geospatial network inventory systems? How often do you see physical plant mapping […]
Sourced from: www.couponraja.in I sometimes wonder whether OPEX is underestimated when considering OSS investments, or at least some facets (sorry, awful pun there!) of it. Cost-out (aka head-count reduction) seems to be the most prominent OSS business case justification lever. So that’s clearly not underestimated. And the move to cloud is also an OPEX play […]
In a post last week we posed the question on whether Inventory Management still retains relevance. A friend recently posited that inventory tools are no longer relevant. I see where he’s coming from but also tend to disagree (but with an open mind). IMHO There are certainly uses cases where inventory remains unquestionably needed. […]
“When experts are wrong, it’s often because they’re experts on an earlier version of the world.” Paul Graham. OSS experts are often wrong. Not only because of the “earlier version of the world” paradigm mentioned above, but also the “parallel worlds” paradigm that’s not explicitly mentioned. That is, they may be experts on one […]
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 […]
Seems this post from last week has triggered some really interesting debate – Is your service assurance really service assurance?? (Part 5). It was a post that looked into collecting end-to-end service metrics rather than our traditional method of collecting network device events/metrics and trying to reverse-engineer to form a service-level perspective. Thought I’d give […]
In yesterday’s fourth part of this series about modern network service assurance, we wrote this: I also just stumbled upon OpenTelemetry, an open source project designed to capture traces / metrics / logs from apps / microservices. It intrigued me because just as you have the concept of traces / metrics / logs for apps, […]
“Whatever is well conceived is clearly said, And the words to say it flow with ease.” Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux. I’d like to hijack this quote and re-direct it towards architectures. Could we equally state that a well conceived architecture can be clearly understood? Some modern OSS/IT frameworks that I’ve seen recently are hugely complex. The question […]
“…as technology gets more complicated, it becomes more difficult for buyers to acquire the skills needed to make even a basic assessment of value. Without such an assessment, it’s hard to get a project going, and in particular hard to get one going the right way.” Tom Nolle. Have you noticed that over the last […]
In a recent article, we talked about Network Service Assurance (NSA) in an environment where network virtualisation exists. One of the benefits of virtualisation or NaaS (Network as a Service) is that it provides a layer of programmability to your network. That is, to be able to instantiate network services by software through a network […]
Let me start today with a question: Does your future OSS/BSS need to be drastically different to what it is today? Please leave me a comment below, answering yes or no. I’m going to take a guess that most OSS/BSS experts will answer yes to this question, that our future OSS/BSS will change significantly. It’s […]
Back in the old days, Network Service Assurance probably had a different meaning than it might today. Clearly it’s assurance of a network service. That’s fairly obvious. But it’s in the definition of “network service” where the old and new terminologies have the potential to diverge. In years past, telco networks were “nailed up” and […]
After Telstra’s NaaS (Network as a Service) program won a TM Forum excellence award, I promised yesterday to share a post that describes why I’m so excited about the concept of NaaS. As the title suggests above, NaaS has the potential to be as big a paradigm shift for networks (and OSS/BSS) as Agile has […]
Yesterday’s post talked about one of the many dichotomies in OSS – fast and slow data / processes. One of the longer lead-time items in relation to OSS data and processes is in network build and customer connections. From the time when capacity planning or a customer order creates the signal to build, it can […]
