When you work in an organisation that has a multi-tiered hierarchy and you’re not the top boss, then you have a person or people above you. Obviously!
What’s also probably blatantly obvious is that when you work for someone, the one thing they value most of all from you is the ability for you to figure out solutions to problems. They want you to do the tasks assigned without creating or escalating problems that they need to solve.
There’s a concept in the packaging industry known as wrap rage. According to Wikipedia, it’s “the common name for heightened levels of anger and frustration resulting from the inability to open packaging.”
We in the telecommunications industry don’t have a similar term. However, the industry does have a history of causing customer rage, as partly indicated by consistently underperforming on Net Promoter Scores (NPS). Moreover, “In 2021, there were over 300 million wireless carrier subscribers in the U.S. With an industry churn rate of 22 percent, that gives us 95 million frustrated customers taking their interests—and wallet—to another provider.” (source)
Jack Welch, the business leader famed for his decades of service as CEO of GE, has said that there are only two sources of competitive advantage: identification of info about customers faster than competitor and putting insights into action faster than competitors.
It’s one of the main reasons why digital transformation has been a major trend across all industries for many years. It seems like almost every industry wants to use data collection as a means of developing or enhancing competitive advantage.
Every OSS stack goes through periods and decisions that radically shape its direction and impacts for years to come. Whether an off-the-shelf product suite (like SunVizion), or an integrated OSS assembled by carriers, the same is true.
There’s an old saying, “if you want something done, ask a busy person to do it.”
We’ve found this to be true in the work we do. The people who are best at delivering will be asked by more people to deliver on more tasks. The jobs pile on up. The beneficial by-product of this is that the busy person tends to become even more efficient at using available time and resources. They become invaluable for the organisations they represent.
Have you ever asked what is network orchestration? It’s a pretty fancy title. All it really is though is a technique to push commands down into a network to change its configuration. Sounds simple.
However, don’t let that description imply that it’s easy. In some cases, it can be relatively easy – if this happens, then do that (IFTTT). If a new customer order arrives in a queue, then push a command (and associated attributes) to the network to allow the order to be activated. If the performance of a given network link goes outside expected bounds, then apply some sort of traffic shaping policy.
Network virtualisation has many benefits. It explains why network operators and vendors have invested so much in advancing this category of technology.
The primary benefit is the flexibility that virtualised networks allow. Unlike physical networks, it’s relatively fast and easy to change the configuration, topology, function and usage of virtual networks. Physical network changes tend to require human intervention, often with long planning cycles. By contrast, virtual networks can be changed almost instantaneously, not to mention being modifiable using algorithmic / automated techniques. This allows the networks to be optimised for usage patterns and performance targets in near real time.
Since the earliest days of long-haul telecommunications, the global network has been one of the most complex machines in the world. And in OSS, we have a “controller” that’s responsible for monitoring and managing these interconnected network “machines.” OSS inherits complexity from them. Therefore, the tendency is for OSS to also be complex.
