OSS and BSS solution architects go to great pains to design and build data ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) pipelines. There’s in-depth engineering that goes into it, from considering the various sources of data and the plumbing to move data around to wherever it’s needed in the overall solution.
Scott Carey, in his article on InfoWorld, poses the question, “Now, with many vendors focusing on managed services and abstraction, the pendulum appears to be swinging the other way. After the great fragmentation, are we due a great consolidation?”
Henry Ford once said, “Don’t find fault, find a remedy; anybody can complain.”
The question to ask yourself is whether your existing network management solutions are complainers? In other words, do they just state the problems they find, or are they actually helping you to find a remedy to the many problems that arise in operational networks?
Operations Support Systems (OSS) collect a lot of data across many different areas of interest including, but certainly not limited to:
This article is a story about human ingenuity and the enormous achievements of humanity. In part relating to the inventiveness of OSS, but also by drawing comparisons to the exploration of space.
Have you ever stopped to wonder why OSS and BSS exist? Why they were first invented, then implemented? Have you also pondered whether that initial “why?” statement still has any relevance today?
There was a time when OSS/BSS build and transformation projects were sexy. They were the hot new technology projects that carriers around the world were embarking on. They offered the promise of lifting operations teams up a level from what the NMS (Network Management Systems) tools provided that they had previously relied upon. The promises of those OSS/BSS transformations were tantalising. They offered drastic improvements, increasing operator effectiveness and business optimisation compared with the manual, swivel-chair approaches required with NMS-level operations.
The answer to this question seems so obvious at first glance. There are constant changes going on in a telco network, so there’s clearly a need to implement those changes via corresponding planning and design activities. But what might not be so obvious is the importance of those network design and planning decisions on the efficiency and effectiveness of the network. This blog highlights the many ways in which these effects play out in the short term and the longer term.
