Monthly Archives: April 2008

SofNet Day Two. A Jungle of Capabilities and a Services Desert

Summarizing day two of SofNet. Panel session, “How Can 21CN Help Make Customers Successful?”  was a who’s who on UK telecom executives with John Cunliffe, Ericsson; John Frieslaar, Huawei; Geoff Hall, Nortel; John-Paul Hemingway, Ciena; Phil Dance, BT; David Soldani, NSN; Andy Stevenson, Fujitsu; and Phil Tilley, ALU.  With so many suppliers in such a […]

SofNet Day One

SofNet brings together three of the main drivers in the telcom industry, NGN (Next Generation Network), Web 2.0 and the telecom service layer (also known as the SDP, Service Delivery Platform).  Now when it comes to the definition of SDP, I’m usually reminded of this quote from “Through the Looking Glass:” `I don’t know what […]

Operators and their Application Developer Communities

“But shouldn’t our suppliers be building the developer programs?” I hear some operators asking. However, infrastructure suppliers make money by selling boxes, software licenses, maintenance and support; those suppliers do not understand the end customers as well as the operator. If they do, then the operator will likely not be independent for long. There is […]

Startups to Watch: HomeCamera, home monitoring made easy

HomeCamera enables people to securely see what’s going on at home without being an expert in geeky stuff like DDNS (Dynamic Domain Name System), NAT (Network Address Translation) and port forwarding, which are generally required for the home surveillance solutions on the market today.  HomeCamera aims to be an easy-to-use home surveillance system, with any […]

OSS Consolidation Part 2: Recommendations on Service Delivery

What is a ‘service delivery architecture’?  It really depends upon with whom you are talking.  Are they are a vendor trying to sell IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), or a Java games download platform; or are they an operator responsible for value-added communication services, IPTV, or content services.  Each will likely give quite different answers.  Service […]

Startups to Watch: Wadaro, monitoring mobile network and services performance.

We’ve all experienced it: you’re on a call, not moving around, just talking and the call drops, you check the signal level on the phone and it’s gone only to return to near full strength as you check.  Does the operator even know what’s just happened?  And then when you’re on the move, for example […]

Start-ups to Watch: Miniweb, adding interactivity to TV programming

With the launch of services such as FiOS from Verizon and U-Verse from AT&T, TV services in the US are finally entering the 21st Century, where widgets are now available on the TV such as local weather and traffic; it’s slowly becoming interactive.  As anyone from the UK will attest Sky, a satellite TV service […]

OSS Consolidation Part 1: Examining Service Management (Fulfillment and Assurance)

Starting with a few definitions: Service Fulfillment systems support processes that ensure service providers give requested services to customers in a timely and correct manner, so called Order-to-Cash cycle. Service Assurance solutions monitor service performance based on the customer’s view, not the network manager’s view, based on defined key performance indicators (KPIs), key quality indicators […]

The On Device Portal Landscape

As part of the SDP (Service Delivery Platform) workshop a run, I have a section on the ODP (On Device Portal), where I run through the ODP landscape.  I maintain a table of companies I consider relevant to the ODP Landscape, if you see any gaps or errors let me know, thanks.  During the years […]