An OSS niche market opportunity?

“The survey found that 82 percent of service providers conduct less than half of customer transactions digitally, despite the fact that nearly 80 percent of respondents said they are moving forward with business-wide digital transformation programs of varying size and scale. This underscores a large perception gap in understanding, completing and benefiting from digitalization programs. […]

Interaction points with fast/slow processes

Further to yesterday’s post on fast / slow processes and factory platforms, a concept presented by Sylvain Denis of Orange in Melbourne last week, here’s a diagram from Sylvain’s presentation pack : The yellow blocks represent the fast (automated) processes. The orange blocks represent the slow processes. The next slide showed the human interaction points […]

Posing a Network Data Synchronisation Protocol (NDSP) concept

Data quality is one of the biggest challenges we face in OSS. A product could be technically perfect, but if the data being pumped into it is poor, then the user experience of the product will be awful – the OSS becomes unusable, and that in itself generates a data quality death spiral. This becomes […]

Can you re-skill fast enough to justify microservices?

“There’s some things that I’ve challenged my team to do. We have to be faster than the web scale players and that sounds audacious. I tell them you can’t you can’t go to the bus station and catch a bus that’s already left the station by getting on a bus. We have to be faster […]

Avoiding the OSS honey trap

Regardless of whose estimates you read, OSS is a multi billion industry. However, based on the relatively infrequent signing of new vendor deals, it’s safe to say that only a very small percentage of those billions are ever “in play.” In other words, OSS tend to be very sticky, in part because they’re so difficult […]

Guns don’t kill OSS

Guns don’t kill people, people do. Similarly, Technology doesn’t kill OSS projects, people do… Actually people with technology do. The following shows the escalation of global CAPEX allocated by CSPs over the last thirty years (in current currency).. apart from a few brief years around the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). The CAPEX uplift also represents […]

Dirty tickets done dirt cheap

“The only way to get rid of Dirty Tickets of Work (DToW) is to get rid of Tickets of Work (ToW)” DToW is terminology used in Telstra to indicate that incorrect information has been entered into the ToW or where the field tech hasn’t been able to complete the ToW as originally designed / planned. […]

A new, more sophisticated closed-loop OSS model

Back in early 2014, PAOSS posted an article about the importance of closed loop designs in OSS, which included the picture below: It generated quite a bit of discussion at the time and led me to being introduced to two companies that were separately doing some interesting aspects of this theoretical closed loop system. [Interestingly, […]

An OSS knowledge plane for SDN

“We propose a new objective for network research: to build a fundamentally different sort of network that can assemble itself given high level instructions, reassemble itself as requirements change, automatically discover when something goes wrong, an automatically fix a detected problem or explain why it cannot do so. We further argue that to achieve this […]

I want a business outcome, not a deployment challenge

“We can look and take lessons on how services evolved in the cloud space. Our customers have expressed how they want to take these services and want a business outcome, not a deployment challenge.” Shawn Hakl. Make no mistake, cloud OSS is still a deployment challenge (at this nascent stage at least), but in the […]

People pay for two things. What about OSS?

“People pay for two things: Results: You do something they couldn’t do for themselves. Convenience: You do something they don’t want to do for themselves, or you make something difficult easier to do.” Ramit Sethi. I really like the way Ramit has broken down an infinite number of variants down to just two key categories. […]

It’s all about the variants

“I’ve been involved in telecom operations for decades, and I’ve learned that there is nothing in networking as inertial as OSS/BSS. A large minority of my experts (but still a minority) think that we should scrap the whole OSS/BSS model and simply integrate operations tasks with the service models of SDN and NFV orchestration. That’s […]

What happens if we cross high-speed trading with OSS?

“The law of diminishing marginal utility is a theory in economics that says that with increased consumption, satisfaction decreases. ou are at a park on a winter’s day, and someone is selling hot dogs for $1 each. You eat one. It tastes good and satisfies you, so you have another one, and another etc. Eventually, […]

How to disrupt through your OSS – a base principles framework

We’ve all heard the stories about the communications services industry being ripe for disruption. In fact many over-the-top (OTT) players, like Skype and WhatsApp have already proven this fact for basic communications services, let alone the value-add applications that leverage CSP connectivity. As much as the innovative technologies they’ve built, the OTT players have thrived via some […]

Crossing the OSS tech chasm

When discussing yesterday’s post about increasing feedback loops in OSS, the technology gap on exponential technologies such as IoT, network virtualisation and machine learning reminded me of Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm” as shown in the graph below. In the context of the abovementioned technologies, the chasm isn’t represented by the adoption of a product (as per […]

Getting ahead of feedback

“Amazon is making its Greengrass functional programming cloud-to-premises bridge available to all customers… This is an important signal to the market in the area of IoT, and also a potentially critical step in deciding whether edge (fog) computing or centralized cloud will drive cloud infrastructure evolution… The most compelling application for [Amazon] Lambda is event […]

OSS S-curves

“I should say… that in the real world exponential curves don’t continue for ever. We get S-curves which closely mimic exponential curves in the beginning, but then tail off after a while often as new technologies hit physical limits which prevent further progress. What seems to happen in practice is that some new technology emerges […]

The Second Law of OSS Thermodynamics

“Applying the Second Law of Thermodynamics to understanding reality, Boyd infers that individuals or organizations that don’t communicate with the outside world by getting new information about the environment or by creating new mental models act like a “closed system.” And just as a closed system in nature will have increasing entropy, or disorder, so […]

Theseus’ OSS transformation

Last week we compared OSS to Theseus’ ship, how it was constantly being rebuilt mid-voyage, then posing the question whether it was still actually the same ship. OSS transformation is increasingly becoming a Theseus’ ship model. In the past, we may’ve had the chance to do big-bang cutovers, where we simply migrated users from one […]

Rebuilding the OSS boat during the voyage

“When you evaluate the market, you’re looking to understand where people are today. You empathize. Then you move into storytelling. You tell the story of how you can make their lives better. That’s the “after” state. All marketing ever does is articulate that shift. You have to have the best product, and you’ve got to […]