On the ever-popular topic of zero-touch automation, Light Reading has an interesting piece that opens what might well be the big question of the whole topic—“What about the TMF?” The TMF is the baseline reference for OSS/BSS, a body that at least the CIO portions of operator organizations tend to trust. The TMF has also…
In my last blog, I talked about the need to plan strategically and implement tactically. The logic behind that recommendation is that it’s all too easy to take short-term measures you think will lead somewhere, and then go nowhere beyond the short term. Looking at operators’ actions in 2017 and their plans in 2018, I…
We are not through the first earnings season of the year, the first after the new tax law passed, but we are far enough into it to be able to see the outlines of technology trends in 2018. Things could be a lot worse, the summary might go, but they could also still get worse. …
If you read this blog regularly you know I believe the future of IT lies in event processing. In my last blog, I explained what was happening and how the future of cloud computing, edge computing, and IT overall is tied to events. Event-driven software is the next logical progression in an IT evolution I’ve…
What is an “edge” and what is a “cloud”? Those questions might have seemed surpassingly dumb even a year ago, but today we’re seeing growing confusion on the topic of future computing and the reason comes down to this pair of questions. As usual, there’s a fair measure of hype involved in the debate, but…
5G may be the darling of the networking media, but it has profound technical and economic issues. The standards aren’t yet done, there are questions about how some of the proposed features would be implemented, and there’s the overriding question of whether there will be sufficient return on investment for operators. Those complications are daunting,…
I know that I’ve saved the hardest of the zero-touch issues for last. The technical or software architecture almost has to be considered at the end, because you can’t talk about it without framing scope and functionality. Those who read my last blog know that I touched on technical issues with the comment that a…
Scope of impact is critical for the success of zero-touch automation, whether we’re talking about the general case of managing application/service lifecycles or the specific case of supporting network operator transformation. There’s a lot of stuff to be done in deploying and sustaining something useful, and the more pieces there are involved the more expensive…
The more you, do the more it helps…and costs. That’s the challenge of scope for zero-touch automation in a nutshell. The challenge is especially acute when you consider that the term itself could be applied in many ways. What exactly are we zero-touch automating? It’s that question, the question of scope, that determines the impact…
There’s no question that “zero-touch automation” is emerging as the new industry buzzword (or words), and it has the advantage or disadvantage of being more complicated than most of our past ones. Sure, at the high level at least, you can express the idea simply. It’s about full automation of the service or application lifecycle,…