OSS Line

Ericordia/Telicsson - Ericsson Completes Purchase of Telcordia

Back in June, after several month of speculation, news broke that it was Ericsson that intended to buy Telcordia. That deal has now completed, just a few weeks later than expected.

Celebratory Ericsson-branded mugs all-round for the Telcordia team.

According to the press release, Telcordia was aquired for $1.15billion for annual revenues of $739m.

Telcordia now joins Ericsson's Business Unit Mulimedia.

Comverse up for Sale

Is Comverse looking for a buyer of their BSS software?

Globes has a story about Comverse looking to sell their telco billing unit. This comes a few days after a number of people in the industry received invitations from investment bankers to discuss the potential acquisition of a "premier billing and OSS software company... in the US".

Globes suggests Oracle may be interested, which makes a lot of sense. More telco software to sell more hardware and software infrastructure alongside their OSS offerings.

NetBoss Acquires Sidonis

News from Management World Americas last week: NetBoss has completed acquisition of Sidonis, the start-up doing clever stuff in service assurance.

Sidonis are a small team (I could count them on my fingers) based in Bath, UK, who have developed something that NetBoss, and many other SA players, lack. Most SA solutions focus on collecting, filtering and prioritising network alarms, which is nice but only half the information that network ops need. It says here:

"Sidonis technologies include the industries most advanced software applications for determining both the impact on services and the root cause of failures in large, complex networks spanning multiple technology domains."

In the past many SA vendors had to integrate with relatively expensive and heavy-weight inventory solutions to 'enrich' alarms with service information or perform topology-aware analysis like root-cause determination. With this acquisition, NetBoss is building out a more complete, stand-alone SA solution with less dependencies on third-parties and reduced cost of integration.

The official word about NetBoss acquiring Sidonis is here.

 

iCloud and The Death of the Asynchronous Network Model

Something else to blame on the over-the-top service providers (yes, those guys who actually make money from comms). New Cloud services are breaking the content-consumption model that ADSL, and network planning in general, is predicated on.

iCloud is not the first Cloud service to be sold to consumers. But, like so many things from Apple, it may well be the first to be adopted en masse, changing the way a large number of broadband subscribers use their bandwidth.

Various flavours of ADSL exist, supplying different levels of bandwidths to users. What they have in common is that they are asynchronous (The A in ADSL) providing significantly more download bandwidth to the customer compared with upload bandwidth to the Internet. This ratio can be quite large; a modern ADSL service from my UK-based supplier is 40Mbs down, 2Mbs up.

That’s great when you spend most of your time browsing the web or downloading video-on-demand. Until recently, uploading data was pretty rare; Just a few Word docs attached to emails or a few dozen photos uploaded to Flickr.

Cloud services, particularly back-up or file-sharing services like iCloud or Dropbox, make much greater demands on the upload bandwidth. The moment someone buys iCloud or Dropbox a heck of a lot of files need to be upload to ‘the Cloud’ for storage/back-up/sharing. All those MP3s, home-made videos, big PowerPoint slides... ADSL isn’t great at offering the customer good upload speeds, which may be something of a disappointment. More critically to the telco, their entire model for understanding customer bandwidth demand and their resultant network architecture breaks.

The network has been architected around ADSL. Recent investment in new architectures, like CDN, are aimed at alleviating performance and capacity issues for the old data-consumption usage pattern.

When iCloud takes off, pretty much every file, of every customer, will need to be uploaded to The Cloud. If 20% of your customers buy iCloud at the same time, thanks to an Apple marketing push, would your network be ready? Do you meter or charge for upload traffic? Do you have a service plan for consumers who sync a lot of data?

Remember how much of a hassle illegal peer-to-peer file sharing was for telcos a few years back? iCloud is about to legitimise comparable file-transfer traffic loads, with none of the efficiencies inherent in P2P, promoted by millions of marketing dollars...

Some More Tribold Investment

Yesterday, Tribold announced a funding round of Some Money for strategic investment purposes.

This follows $11 million back in January 2009 from Intel, DFJ Esprit and my local VC, Eden Ventures.

This time the value of the investment has not been disclosed. Nor has Eden contributed to this round, as far as I can tell from the PR.

Nic Brisbourne (who’s blog you really should check out), partner at DFJ Esprit, added: “As an existing investor in Tribold, we are confident of the company, its technology and its management. The involvement of Intel Capital also confirms Tribold’s potential for us. We’re also happy to have had the opportunity to increase our own investment in the company.”

Cisco Buys Bits of Comptel

It says here that Comptel is selling parts of its OSS portfolio to Cisco.

This is not the clear-cut Big-Vendor-Buys-OSS-Company that we are familiar with. No, in this case Cisco is acquiring a specific part of Comptel's OSS product portfolio: The Axioss suite picked up as part of Comptel's own acquisition of UK-based Axiom back in 2008.

Furthermore, some of the Axioss staff will move as part of the deal, but Comptel will remain in the OSS market with its other products and, perhaps most interestingly, will continue to offer support to their existing Axioss customers.

So, from Cisco's perspective it's a technology purchase, giving them the freedom to employ it however they wish, without the ball-and-chain of existing support contracts.

Cisco has a history of investing in OSS to augment the core iOS network management system. This investment has been both in-house development and acquisition. To my knowledge this is a first step-up to 'proper' fulfilment OSS, as opposed to stand-alone engineering tools.

Expect more of this in the next twenty four months: Anyone at recent events like TMW Dublin will have noticed how the traditional OSS vendors booths are getting smaller while hardware vendors like Huawei are Going Big.

Hardware vendors <3 OSS right now. This, along with the Ericordia deal, is the start of a second wave of OSS deals.

Update: The purchase price is 21.3 million Euros. Not bad in the current economy. Comptel acquired Axiom for 'up to' 21.6 million Euros, based on another slightly unusual deal that tied the price to their business performance for the year.

Ericsson to buy Telcordia

As if to prove you should never listen to rumours (eh? Light Reading?), Ericsson has announced their plan to purchase Telcordia.

Priced at $1.2bn for the OSS big-hitter reported to be currently doing around $739m in revenues.

Much more exciting news than my assumption of an investment bank putting up the cash.

More details on the FT website.

Hashtag for TMForum Management World Dublin 2011

...is officially #mwd11 (although I've seen a few #mw2011 tweets already).

So I'll be tweeting #mwd11 like it's hot, in the run up to Management World 2011 and during, if I get any spare time between staffing Aria's Expo booth, Forumville demo and attending the after show parties.

Yes, OSS has after show parties. And, yes, they rock can be very pleasant networking opportunities indeed.

Bored of OSS Yet?

I've been doing this OSS thing for nearly 13 years, but can't seem to escape.

From time to time I will bump in to an ex-colleague, someone I experienced the early days of inventory-centric service fulfilment with, and they will give me a pitying look almost to say 'aw, you're still in OSS?'. And, down the pub, my pals who I still share the telco software industry with excitedly talk  about their latest side-project and exit strategy: Their pre-funding start-up or great idea that will get them in to something far more glamorous like enterprise software, databases, or lion taming.

Maybe I should have a side project? Perhaps I should accept the head-hunters call to have a chat about opportunities in the #sexybilling software industry? Because, I sometimes think, I might be a bit bored of OSS.

Why am I still doing this?

Because even though it feels like I've been trying to solve the same problems for 13 years, the industry's problems are not static. New tech, new services, new challenges and new solutions. Every year you have to look at the same recurring problems (data, integration, process automation...) with a fresh and open mind. 

While it's made me old beyond my years, it's sort-of been in a good way. Being in a niche within the relatively small telco software industry gives us great opportunities to experience a lot and build a varied career. Thanks to some great colleagues, I've never felt held back in OSS. I still find it hard to believe they let me do marketing now. 

Telcos change their habits at a glacial rate. But that's because they're the guys who have to deliver reliable services and, typically, actually make money doing so, without pimping out our personal details or pushing adverts at us. Telco has had its own bubbles and hype, but this is an industry based on good old-fashion profits. Likewise, in OSS you have to create products that offer a return on investment. You have to solve real business problems. And you have to build a sustainable business. It's not sexy, but it's keeping it real.

So, should I retrain as a professional swimwear photographer? No. Not yet.

OSS has been good to me. And the good friends I've met through this industry would probably admit the same. For all the pub talk about doing something else, we all find ourselves happily stuck in this little telco software niche.

Telcordia Dips Toe in Cloudy Waters of SaaS for OSS

Is this a precursor to wider deployment of OSS products in the Cloud?

“Telcordia, a global leader in [blah blah etc.], announced today the availability of the Telcordia eLab, a new service that provides integrator partners with cloud-based access to the company's Next Generation OSS portfolio…”

Finally , a serious, all be it small, step towards new deployment architectures and business models for Big OSS. Telcordia’s ‘Next Generation’ software (Granite and Network Engineer) is now easily turn-on-and-off-able for those short term projects that you don’t want to be buying expensive hardware for.

Today, Telcordia eLab is only used for training, demo and testing purposes. But, presumably, there is no reason that, if this is successful, Telcordia couldn’t extend this service to commercial use of the OSS products. Training and testing is the natural first choice though.

And very clever of Telcordia to go for those low-hanging fruit first: It allows them to deliver their training services far quicker, with control over the installation, while reducing the overall total-cost of the activity.

How big is the jump to a full useable installation in the Cloud? Pretty big actually. With this first step Telcordia have technically proven their applications work in a virtual-machine based Cloud environment. But that does not necessarily include the large stack of admin, security and billing infrastructure that is required for a true SaaS offering in the cloud. More significant though, is the step their customers would have to take: Accepting that there are cost-of-ownership benefits to non-perpetual licenses and off-site deployments of business critical software. A leap of faith few telcos have made in the past.

What is Planning and Capacity Management?

I am reposting here my response to a discussion on the OSS/BSS Professionals LinkedIn group, with some edits for clarity. The question, to paraphrase, was ‘what planning and capacity management tools are out there…’

‘Planning’ covers a lot of ground. After all, ‘planning’ is basically doing some analysis, checks, or having a bit of a think before going ahead and changing the network, buying equipment or trying to turn on a service.

Inventory-centric fulfilment systems like Amdocs Cramer, Telcordia Granite, NEC Netcracker and Oracle Metasolv (et al) focus on planning the ‘now’ or ‘committed’ network. They tell you what the network looks like today, exactly which resource (timeslot, port...) you can allocate to a service order. They will also give you a snapshot of the network utilisation today, so you could see, for example, if some resource has hit 90% utilisation.

Some of those inventory solutions also have trends/threshold to track resource consumption, and may also offer tools to plan build-out of new network (how to knit-in a new ring or deploy more fibres in the ground). I guess you could say they take a ‘bottom up’ approach to capacity planning – looking at the network rather than the market.

Capacity planning should start much sooner than the point an order is received or a resource hits 90% utilisation. So dedicated planning products, like those from my day-job sponsor Aria Networks, address planning from a top-down market-driven perspective:

• What are the business requirements?
• What are the service forecasts?
• How can I best support these on my network going forward?

These sorts of solutions will have a more ‘economic’ view of the network and services, along with physical/logical resource capacity, to allow analysis of how the service provider can increase efficiency in the network this month, this quarter, and next year.

The other thing solutions like Aria Networks have to address, unlike inventory products, is ‘what-if’ and strategic planning. For example, wire line operators are looking at introducing CDN (or Cloud, or IP over Optical, or...). Capacity planning tools need to be able to analyse the many hundreds or thousands of deployment options, vendors, device locations and parameters in order to tell the operator whether CDN is going to solve their capacity crunch issues and do so in a way that is likely to offer a return on investment. This sort of ‘network analytics’ is very different from the necessarily ‘static’ current view of inventory systems.

Ok, I’ve just compared two broad sets of planning products there: Inventory and capacity planning. Other systems have a hand in planning as well; Vendor network management tools, GIS for inside/outside plant, engineering planning tools like VPI and Wandl, packet simulators like Opnet.

All have a role to play. So what do you want to plan?

Sidonis Second Round Funding

Good news from our friends at Sidonis, the UK-based start-up doing clever things in service assurance. They’ve bagged a 2nd round of funding and, as is often the way with these things, welcomed a new member to the board.

Jim McKenna becomes non-executive Chairman.

No info on how much cash they’ve received but, hey, it’s gauche to talk about money isn’t it?

Capacity Crunch Tweet Chat

On Wednesday January 26th Amdocs (@amdocsinc) will be hosting a live tweet chat on the subject of network capacity crunch. In attendance will be David Chambers (Amdocs Product Manager) and Teresa Cottam (@teresacottam) of Telesperience.

Just rock up at 4pm GMT, follow their #doxchat hash-tag and contribute your thoughts. Or just come and find out what a tweet chat is. I know David and Teresa will host a great session.

Should be interesting. More info here.

See you there.

Telcordia up for Sale

Telcordia has put up the for-sale sign, with a private sale looking more likely than an IPO. Telcordia’s current owners, private equity firms Providence Equity Partners and Warburg Pincus, have hired an investment bank to find a buyer.

News from The Wall Street Journal, republished in the telco press suggests a value of $1bn to $1.5bn, with possible industry acquirers being Amdocs, HP or Oracle. Less exciting, but more probable, is a sale to some other private equity firm.

Never mind that. How about some wild speculation? What would our industry do with Telcordia?

Amdocs. Significant product overlap in the inventory and fulfilment portfolio. It would be something to observe historic rival OSS suites Cramer and Granite going through a product merger. Amdocs lack anything to compare with Telcordia Network Engineer or Telcordia’s regulatory focused solutions, both of which would flesh-out their telco software offering.

UPDATE: Globes, the Israeil business site, ran with this scenario. Amdocs' biggest aquisition to date being Solect in 2000 for $1bn. Could they really drop another billion on Telcordia?

HP. Would probably love to access Telcordia’s regulatory offerings, like number portability, which often involve significant consultancy opportunities.

Oracle. Already have several million inventory solutions from Metasolv acquisition and subsequent new-builds. Adding a couple more wouldn’t make a dent. Like Amdocs, Telcordia’s Network Engineer would be a clear benefit, but regulatory and transformation solutions, with associated databases and middleware sales, would be attractive to Oracle. The strong domain expertise in Telcordia could help Oracle better compete with Amdocs.

We can only hope something so exciting will happen, rather than a dull deal between men in grey suits. I salivate at the prospect of an Amdocs-Telcordia mega-OSS-vendor. Is that wrong?

Top-10 People in OSS, Telco and Tech to Follow in 2011

It’s the end of 2010, and legally all bloggers must post a top-10 list.

Rather than a run-down of the news, I want to pick out a few of the guys you should be following in the OSS software, technology and tech business. These are some of the small band of people in our industry embracing social media; Follow them and learn from them...

In no particular order, these are all Twitters unless otherwise linked:

@Celonamigrate and Tony Sceales at the Celona Blog. One of the early adopters of blogging and social media in OSS, Tony can be found on the company blog as well as contributing to community sites such as TMF Forums.

Billing and OSS World blogs. While these can come across as a little corporate they are still a great collection of insights from guest bloggers. Find out what the industry is selling you this year…

@Telesperience @Teresacottam and @Darranclem have had a great 2010, firmly establishing themselves in the OSS analyst constellation. Big tweeters, bloggers, podcasters and recently added a Wiki to their social media portfolio.

@Arianetworks. Ok, full disclosure: This is my other blog, shared with the Aria exec team. Check it out for a new look at OSS analytics, planning and optimisation.

@Brisbourne has been blogging and Tweeting for ages on the trends and changes in venture capital, with a big emphasis on technology business. You should care because this has a direct influence on innovation and growth in the OSS industry.

@Amdocsinc, @Givoly et al. First of the big boys (and girls) to really go-for-it social-wise. And after that slightly uncomfortable start they now have genuine, open network that engages their customers and staff.

For prolific tweeting on the telco industry, with a mobile slant, check out @Joeweinman. Ex-of AT&T and big on the speaking circuit, his dry wit makes the dullest subjects palatable. A rare talent.

The only guy you need to know if you’re working with Oracle databases is Tom Kyte. Answering your questions for many years, his Ask Tom page probably has answers to any question you might have, and his Oracle books have to be the first thing you read before designing any back-end system.

For some great wrap-ups of the latest telco and OSS news the Telco 2.0 guys do a great job of sorting the news from the PR.

Martin Geddes hasn’t blogged much lately but you can still follow his views on telco and IT on @Martingeddes, and there’s a promise of an all new blog coming soon in 2011.

 

The Definition of OSS and BSS

What is OSS and BSS? Getting back-to-basics can be a challenge at times. How to explain what OSS and BSS mean. Concisely. Accurately. There’s always been debate and opinion on their respective roles. And people can’t even agree what OSS stands for. OSS Line shines a light on this thorny but fundamental topic…

What does OSS and BSS stand for?

OSS is either Operational Support System or Operations Support System.

You have too much time on your hands if you want to argue over which is the ‘correct’ definition. Historically, I’ve used Operational, but I acknowledge that Operations sort of makes more sense when you think about it…

BSS stands for Business Support Systems. Simple. No debate.

What are Operational Support Systems?

Software (occasionally hardware) applications that support back-office activities which operate a telco’s network, provision and maintain customer services.

OSS is traditionally used by network planners, operations, architects, support, and engineering teams in the service provider. Increasingly product managers and senior staff under the CTO or COO may also use or rely on OSS to some extent.

What are Business Support Systems?

Software applications that support customer-facing activities. Billing, order management, customer relationship management, call centre automation, are all BSS applications.

BSS may also encompass the customer-facing veneer of OSS application such as trouble-ticketing and service assurance – these are back-office activities but initiated directly by contact with the customer.

above. Super simple relationship between OSS and BSS

Is the separation between OSS and BSS clear?

No way! Apart from service assurance activities being cross-OSS-BSS processes, there are as many overlapping functions as there are clean integration points between the two domains. Indeed, it could be argued that the distinction between OSS and BSS is no longer useful. Yet, these terms continue to be used.

Service Catalogs introduced a grey area between OSS and BSS. No one was sure where they lived. But that's their strength. They exist to bridge the gap.

Similarly Service Management applications allowed greater interaction between OSS and BSS processes.

Before Service Catalogs, before Service Management, a common job like capturing a customer order and provisioning it required a simple BSS-to-OSS interface. “Provision product X for customer Y”. Then networks got more complicated, more flexible, and telcos started to offer a range of differentiated products. OSS and BSS had to start liaising over what could be ordered by the customer, based on what service they already had, based on the network they would use, based on current available resources, based on how far they were from the telephone exchange… and so on.

Views of the network configuration are pushed up in to BSS in the form of Service Catalogs. Service Management processes push BSS decision-making down, close to the network, to determine what is the right service to offer for this customer.

There’s now less debate about what these in-between systems do, but still plenty of uncertainty about who’s budget the implementation project comes out of…

New Aria Networks Website

Day-job news: I’ve been busy over the last few weeks preparing Aria’s new website. Last week it went live.

If you head over to www.aria-networks.com you’ll see...

• All new content. Easier to find and clearer explanations of all the clever stuff Aria does
• More ways to follow Aria. Sign-up for the occasional newsletter or get instant updates through the RSS feed
• A new logo. To complete the new look

The new site improves the ‘journey’ prospects take from finding Aria, arriving on the site, establishing that they have a relevant solution, and then learning more about specific product differentiators. It is also built to improve search engine results and allow Aria more flexibility for adding new content.

Take a look. I hope you like it.

Hints on Writing Bad Press Releases

Great little post by Teresa at Microsperience about how OSS and BSS press releases are hard to interpret.

I’ll plead guilty to many of those crimes myself.

My day job involves writing PR from time to time, as Product Manager/Marketer at Aria Networks. My occasional extra-curricular work on this blog involves reading a lot of PR. And much of it is very difficult to digest (more so the latter than the former, I hope).

One positive change I’m seeing is in companies trying to be more ‘social media’ savvy. The jury is still out on whether Twitter, Facebook, et al are useful tools for B2B marketing (as all OSS/BSS marketing is), but a side-effect is companies adopting a more casual and readable style in their copywriting.

I’ve spent many years writing long rambling product datasheets, slide decks and technology papers. Writing short, interesting copy is a whole different skill (one I’m still learning). My advice? Get some back-to-basics tips on writing: Check out Mark Shaw’s book.

OSS BSS World 2010, London

I’ll be at OSS BSS World in London on the 8th and 9th of September. No booth, just walking the floor and enjoying coffee with my industry peers.

Drop me a mail if you want to hook-up to talk OSS, intelligent planning, Aria, integration architectures, blogging or pretty much anything else.

See you there!

TEOCO Buys TTI

TTI have been doing OSS stuff for some time now. They primed in service assurance but occasionally had aspirations to expand in to the wider OSS ecosystem. As it turns out, service assurance has worked quite well for them as they’ve now been acquired by TEOCO (The Employee Owned COmpany – I guess there’s a story behind that name…) who have to-date focused on cost management and revenue assurance, but clearly want to get closer to the network.

There’s many stages at which a telco might want to do cost management. At the contract phase, where they agree on price and availability of leased lines or interconnects. At the planning or fulfilment phase where consumption of these resources is designed. And, increasingly, on a day-to-day, or even more frequent, operational basis when routing steady-state and failure-state traffic on the network.

TTI compliments TEOCO, allowing them ultimately to take their cost and revenue capabilities in to the network and offer more ‘real-time’ control.

Here’s the TTI TEOCO press release.