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.
“Some pilots are proving quite interesting in enhancing Network Operations. Especially when AI / ML is used in the form of Natural language processing – NOC operators are talking to a ML system in natural language and asking questions in context to an alarm about deep topics ( BGP, 4G eUTRAN, etc). Do more with […]
You’re probably aware that our OSS and/or underlying EMS/NMS have been assisting organisations with their governance, regulatory and compliance (GRC) requirements for some time. Our OSS have provided tools that automatically enforce and validate compliance against configuration policies. Naturally, network virtualisation and network as a service (NaaS) offerings are going to place an increased dependence […]
… but I will because I’m alarmed. 🙂 The advent of network virtualisation, cloud-scaling and API / microservice-centric OSS means that the security attack surface changes significantly compared with old-style solutions. We now have to consider a more diverse application stack, often where parts of the stack are outside our control because they’re As A […]
For those of us in the technology consulting game, we think we’re pretty clever at predicting the next big technology trend. But with the proliferation of information over the Internet, it’s not that difficult to see potentially beneficial technologies coming over the horizon. We can all see network virtualisation, Internet-connected sensor networks, artificial intelligence, etc […]
Have you noticed how the curves we’re dealing with in the service provider industry are either falling off a cliff (eg voice revenues) or going to the sky (eg theoretical exponential growth like IoE)? Here in the OSS industry, we’re stuck in the middle of these two trend curves too. Falling revenues mean reduced appetite […]
No, not “Wow!” the exclamation but the acronym W-O-W. Wow stands for Walk Out Working. In other words, if a customer comes into a retail store, they walk out with a working service rather than exasperation. Whilst many customers wouldn’t be aware of it, there are lots of things that have to happen in an […]
A funny thing happened today. I was looking for a reference to Marc Andreessen’s original, “software is eating the world,” quote and came across an article on TechCrunch that expressed many of the same thoughts I was going to write about. However, it doesn’t specifically cover the service provider and OSS industries so I’ll push […]
Since releasing ECOMP (Enhanced control orchestration and management platform), AT&T has been busy on a data sharing environment, which it announced at the AT&T Developer Summit and is called Indigo. Like ECOMP, AT&T is looking to launch Indigo as an Open Source project through the Linux Foundation, hoping for community collaboration. As you all know, […]
…. but we’ve only just started and we haven’t even got close to figuring out how to manage it yet (from an aggregated view I mean, not just within a single vendor platform)!! This article from Peter Levine of Andreesen Horowitz predicts “The end of cloud computing.” Now I’m not so sure that this headline […]
Marc Andreessen describes platforms as “a system that can be programmed and therefore customized by outside developers — users — and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform’s original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate.” Platform thinking is an important approach for service providers […]
Yesterday’s blog discussed the importance, but (perhaps) mythical concept of Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for service providers and their OSS / BSS. The number of variants, which I can only see amplifying into the future, makes it almost futile to try to implement SOPs. I say “almost futile” because SOPs are theoretically possible if the […]
Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) have been pivotal in codifying and standardising the use cases of service providers for many years. The theory goes that if you can standardise a process, then you can produce repeatably high quality and streamline it in a cycle of continual improvement. The repeatability objective is one* of two primary recollections […]
In two recent posts, we’ve discussed the changing world order of OSS with NFV as a catalyst, and highlighted the challenges posed by maintaining legacy product offerings (the pyramid of OSS pain). These two paradigms (and others such as the touchpoint explosion) are dragging traditional service providers closer to a significant crossroad. Network virtualisation will […]
“operators that seek to implement NFV without preparing their OSS to support it are unlikely to be successful in capturing the new revenue-generating and cost-saving opportunities. OSS should not be an afterthought; it will continue to be central to the operational efficiency and agility of the service provider.” James Crawshaw in “Next-Gen OSS for Hybrid […]
“We’re woefully unprepared to deal with orders of magnitude. Ten times as many orders. One-tenth the number of hospital visits. Ten times the traffic. One-tenth the revenue. Ten times as fast. Because dramatic shifts rarely happen, we bracket everything on the increment, preparing for just a relatively small change here or there. We think we’re […]
“Historically, the center of the Universe had been believed to be a number of locations. Many mythological cosmologies included an axis mundi, the central axis of a flat Earth that connects the Earth, heavens, and other realms together. In the 4th century BC Greece, the geocentric model was developed based on astronomical observation, proposing that […]
In earlier blogs, we’ve referenced this great article on SingularityHub to show how the exponentiality of technological progress tends to surprise us as change initially creeps up on us, then overwhelms us in situations like this: But what if we changed the “exponential growth surprise factor” in the diagram above to “opportunity cost?” Further to […]
“McDonald’s hit a peak moment of productivity by getting to a mythical scale, with a limited menu and little in they way of customization. They could deliver a burger for a fraction of what it might take a diner to do it on demand. McDonald’s now challenges the idea that custom has to cost more, […]
Here’s a slightly mind-blowing fact for you – A child born when iPhone was announced will be 10 years old in 2 months (a piece of trivia courtesy of Ben Evans). That’s nearly 10 years of digitally native workers coming into the telco workforce and 10 years of not-so-digitally native workers exiting it. We marvelled […]
It Took Sheryl Sandberg exactly 2 sentences to give the best career advice you’ll hear today. I want you to ponder the following question for a moment, because it’s one of the most important questions you’ll ever answer… The question was posed to Sheryl Sandberg: “What’s the number one thing you look for in someone […]
