“The innovation point is the pivotal moment when talented and motivated people seek the opportunity to act on their ideas and dreams.”
W. Arthur Porter.
It goes without saying that key players in the OSS industry try to keep their major innovations under wraps. They’re not exactly going to announce that they’re working on technology X and hope to bring a innovation to the market within the next 3 quarters (ie 9 months). That gives their competition an opportunity to counter.
However, they sometimes leave breadcrumbs or hints about what areas they might be moving into in a place where you may never have thought to look previously. It’s not in their promotional literature, annual reports or similar. It’s in their job listings.
Since we’re just starting to get back into the hiring window after the holiday break in many countries, I decided to have a look at the job listings of some of our industry’s biggest players over the weekend. I was paying close attention to breadcrumbs that point to future-facing technologies such as predictive analytics, virtualisation platforms/interfaces/services & automation, customer experience, market insight, localisation services, IoT, big data, etc.
To be honest, I was a little surprised to find most of the roles were aligned to current technologies / approaches. Admittedly there may be many reasons for this (eg targeted or confidential hiring models for strategic roles, I only took a small snap-shot in time, etc).
One vendor had a role entitled, “Market Intelligence Expert (SDN/NFV),” which provides some insight into how important they deem “Creation of valuable market and competitive insight for sales and product teams” for SDN/NFV to be. A few other Engineer/SME roles touched on how OSS is converging with cloud management/automation.
Do you have any other suggestions for identifying industry insights?
Have you ever had an OSS or BSS project that’s impacted by poor data quality? The problem of data integrity gets raised on almost every
“One of my favorite things about designing software is designing the defaults. The defaults define the experience for everyone out of the box. And, therefore,
Have you ever been tasked with mapping out the processes for the telco you work for? Either as a way of documenting current state, or
In the last week alone, I’ve had two potent reminders that the world of OSS is simply (pun intended) too complex. This manifests in many
Here at Passionate About OSS, we are exactly that – Passionate About OSS (Operational Support Systems). We’re also passionate about BSS, NMS, or any other names you call the tools that help to operationalise your network.
2 Responses
Hi Ryan,
That’s quite a good suggestion you’ve made – perhaps another possibility could be to pay attention to the presence and level of vendor participation within specific sub-projects of any relevant standards bodies?
Hi Evan,
That’s a great idea!
That gives an indication of what initiatives they’re directing existing staff effort towards doesn’t it?