Shulist Group Inc.

Alcatel-Lucent’s recent announcement of a major restructuring of its organization leaves us somewhat confused by what it is trying to accomplish. It has now 11 presidents! Maybe more, but that’s what we counted on the announcement. You can read bios here. Smells like matrix management to us.

Whither goes Support Systems?

A interesting note is that they’ve shuffled the Operations and Business Support Systems group from the Services Group into the Appplications Software group. We are quite interested in seeing how this plays out in the long term. Its been our observation, in the past, that the further an OSS or BSS product moves from the Services group the less likely it is to be successful in the market.

In the telecom industry the difference between the hype of new technology and actual implementation of solution sets, that includes that technology, is anything but rational thinking. As a long time colleague of mine used to say, “between vision and reality there lives hallucination”.

IP-Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) started out as the brainchild of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), which incidentally is celebrating its tenth anniversary as a specifications body—a rather long time given the turbulent world of mobile telecom. IMS was part of its Release 5 specification, back in mid-2003, and further revised in Releases 6 & 7. While there is nothing wrong with the basic premise of IMS, there is a world of hard work in going from the concept to the reality of service delivery.

Continue reading ‘IMS Redux’ »

Intercarrier business information exchange for most of the history of telecommunications has involved mixed messages, delayed billing, dial routing, complex rate schedules and settlements generally involving copious amounts of alcohol. A trend we have been following for some time is the ‘neutral broker’ model for data interchange between Carriers.

One company, iXLink, a creation of Telarix, Inc. has been on the scene for just over a year. In July of this year they ground out their one-millionth transaction and have been generating a lot of press lately. It’s an interesting BSS model that has compelling economic opportunities (we think). The company claims that more than 150 carriers worldwide are now using iXLink. A remarkable feat given the short time they have been in business.

A couple of suggestions to iXLink; 1) Your website is impenetrable - could you give us OSS/BSS dweebs a bit more info? and 2) Ever think about a broader market of interaction? Huge numbers of smaller players need to talk to those 150 you have on board, but might like a pay-as-you-go model?

For a long time we have followed the path of the open source telephone products. The Grand Daddy of them being Asterisk, a remarkably well developed PBX, that we even played with it on a spare Linux machine some years back.

A Canadian company that has done some interesting work in commercializing this market space is Jazinga Inc. An analysis of their current business situation appeared in the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business. A number of Canadian entrepreneurs comment on the company’s prospects and suggest ways to move forward. Read the article written by Charles Mandel.

Additionally there was a recent review of the Jazinga product (which, oddly, seems not to have a name other than the company name) done recently by Jon Arnold that you can read here.

Now if only they’d develop an OSS that managed the whole thing remotely for me…

In a rather surprising move (and probably mostly political, as it is election day!) yesterday the head of the FCC struck, from the agenda of today’s meeting, an item relating to both intercarrier settlements and the Universal Service Fund (USF). The former allows for a labyrinth of charges to be levied between carriers for access to each others networks and for the carriage of traffic. The USF was the means by which the FCC created its $7B war chest to subsidize telecom services in poorly served areas.

The intercarrier market has always been a hot bed for support systems, and suppliers in this area were watching this FCC activity with some concern, as the FCC was proposing to dramatically simplify and streamline the charges (read lower rates). The deferral of this decision is seen a bit of a stay of execution as many of the OSS’s in this area are generally complex behemoths. An article by Joelle Tessler of AP details the situation.

Some of you may remember a company called Eftia OSS Solutions (order provisioning  & fulfillment, problem management, telecom circuit & asset inventory management, and telephone number tracking) which operated from 1997 through about 2006. The company was the investment darling of a number of high power VC firms who funded it to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. The company had a meteoric rise to fame prior to 2000 and then the orders “fell off a cliff” as James Bagnall said in his January 2006 article in the Ottawa Citizen.

Old news I know, but the remarkable thing I discovered recently is how someone from Estonia has commandeered the whole website that Eftia operated and is now running it as an advert. We were adding domains to our Telecom Search Engine and the domain popped up in a search as a live link. Being too curious for my own good I followed it.

Continue reading ‘Invasion Of The OSS Domain Body Snatchers’ »

Those of you who know me know that I am always excited about the prospects of a Halloween evening. It’s my most favoured holiday of the year and one which for the most part involves a little home grown creativity. Apparently Ian Portsmouth over at Canadian Business magazine seems to have managed to draw a little small business common sense out of the annual event. You can read his list here.

Three Truths of Cycling: A Leader’s Insight

A few summers ago I had the opportunity to ride one of the most pleasant bicycle routes in Ontario. My daughter invited me down to join her on a ride through Wolfe Island which is a ten minute ferry ride south of Kingston. Now Wolfe Island is no Tour de France but it is a great location for some easy rolling. It also has spectacular views of the Kingston waterfront, the lake boat shipping channels, and summer sailboat races. Not to mention that the locals on the Island have a completely different perspective on how life should proceed.

During part of that ride my daughter was not her usual talkative self and we filled the gaps in the conversation with the spectacular views and thinking about where we were. It was during one of those lulls in conversation that I made an important connection between leadership coaching and the truth about bicycling. Continue reading ‘Bicycle Leadership’ »