OSSera

Mobile World Congress features a new series of phones, tablets, and phablets

2013-02-26T18:23:33Z

Feb. 25-28, 2013 in Barcelona, Spain, the Mobile World Congress features the mobile ecosystem which continues to expand at lightning speed, with rapid innovation and new telecom devices and services.

Some key metrics in the mobile economy of today and tomorrow:

Global subscribers will grow from 3.2 billion to 3.9 billion from 2012 to 2017
1.3 million jobs in the next 5 years
1.1 trillion Capex spend
LTE Growth: 62 million to 920 million 2012 to 2017
Ecosystem revenues $9.1 Trillion cumulative between 2013 to 2017

Full Details available in the Mobile Economy Report on GSMA.com

The conference displayed a parade of new phones, tablets and phablets. Phablets are a new class of smartphones with screen sizes between 5 and 7 inches. The phablet market is anticipated to grow in 2013 balancing the needs of portability and usability.

ASUS reviews a new Padfone device which is a 4.3-inch smartphone and can be converted into a 10.1 inch tablet. Achieving more than 63 hours of extended talk time where both devices can share one data plan. The Padfone will run Android 4.2 operating system.
Nokia announced a new 720 and 520 line of Lumia phones in a rainbow of colors running Windows 8 and wireless charging.
HP also re-entered the market with Slate 7 running Android starting at $169.00. For the full press release.
Samsung invited guests to the Galaxy S4 which unveils on March 14th, in New York
In Barcelona it released the Galaxy Note 8.0 tablet between the existing 7 and 10 inch tablets.

The conference continues until the 28th in Barcelona, Spain.

OSSera is working on Customer Experience Management solutions to monitor Android tablets and phones and overall service quality for Communication Service Providers. More details to be launched soon.

Consistent processes deliver more than 50 percent greater efficiencies in launching new services

2013-01-11T18:37:15Z

OSSera's Service Quality Management Case Study has been featured in the TMF Case Study Handbook 2012. The TMF Case Study is only available to TMF Members.

Consistent processes deliver more than 50 percent greater efficiencies in launching new services

Summary: MIMO Tech Co. Ltd. of Thailand is an IT service provider and content aggregator for value- added services such as mobile, broadband and content. The provisioning of value-added services was becoming increasingly complex and more important to its business in terms of remaining competitive and retaining market share. In addition, the value-added services’ architecture was not flexible enough to support dynamic marketing, technological changes and new business models. It turned to a unified service management tool, aligned with TM Forum’s Frameworx suite of standards, to achieve its business transformation. This helped it reduce operating expenditure by 20 to 30 percent through greater efficiencies between service modeling and monitoring. It also continues to see at least a 50 percent improvement in efficiencies in offering new value-added services compared to the way it used to work. These value-added services include customer-facing services like music, SMS/MMS, call management and downloads among others, and resource-facing services like GPRS/GSM, Edge/UMTS and IP.

About MIMO Tech Co. Ltd:

Business Overview

Advanced Info Service (AIS) is the top Thailand mobile telecommunication company with 54% revenue market share. As of December 2010, the Company registered 31.2 million mobile subscribers, representing 45% subscribers market share. With over 20 years of operation, AIS continues to deliver excellent service to Thai community through superior network covered more than 97% nationwide. In addition to the mobile operator business, AIS also have subsidiary companies which are determined to support the core business operation.

The growing demand of content, application, and mobile internet and wireless broadband are the crucial revenue stream of the telecom business. As, we commit to bring advanced technology and innovation to customers. AIS recently upgraded the technology on the current 2G network to “EDGE Plus” which supports maximum data upload speed of 236 kbps and download speed of 296 kbps with Dual Transfer Mode (DTM) which allows a simultaneous voice call and data connection. In early 2010, we established the subsidiary called MIMO Tech Co., Ltd. (MMT) to operate as a data content aggregator or a pool of content and application which will support various services of AIS and other subsidiaries from the growing consumer demand on mobile data.

Reference AIS for more details.

Our original TMF Case Study is also available here.

Brochures on Service Manager:

InterComms: OSSera Helps CSP Launch 15 New Services per Month!

2012-05-09T17:31:08Z

Click to Download PDF.

Read article on:

About InterComms Magazine

The International Communications Project

International Communications (InterComms) is an authoritative policy, strategy and reference publication for the international telecommunications industry. It is designed to help the key decision makers within the industry to transform their existing business, in terms of regulation, standardisation, optimisation and cost effective mature technology.

InterComms is a co-operative project involving key industry organisations, alliances and forums, providing readers with concise business cases of current technologies that can enhance and strengthen their revenue streams.

InterComms is creating channels between the leading user groups and operators to allow industry to influence the development of global communications, and combined with vendor support provides the readers with the clearest picture of the way to advance within the industry today.

InterComms will be distributed in many formats which will include a 200 page journal, interactive CDs and via this website.

IPTV End-to-End Fault, Performance, Service Planning and Monitoring

2012-04-09T18:28:49Z

IPTV has seen steady growth in the broadband market but with growth there are increasing challenges with customer experience management and overall quality of service. Some problems include:

“We have a large number of Set-Top-Boxes (STB’s) in one area that cannot boot-up.”

“Some of our subscribers are having video quality issues?!?”

“Some subscribers are encountering video quality issues in one particular channel?”

“A single STB is unable to boot-up?”

In the above problem scenarios, the root cause can be anywhere along the end-to-end service chain from the head end to the home. To determine the root cause there are many options but the question for the service provider is who can provide the most flexible solution which helps to transform their overall business operations.

High Performance & Event Volumes - Once a severe problem occurs resulting in an “event or alarm storm” the single-threaded and processor bound architectures reach their limit. These applications sometimes lose alarms and metrics or slow down to process data.
No E2E Network View - A NOC requires a topology view and generally alert displays are not the best way to visualize a unified network view. Plus often network topologies are not designed by operations but planned by engineering. There is often a disconnect in knowledge transfer.
Effective Alarm Management, Reporting and real-time Analysis - Correlation, Suppression, and Reporting analysis tools are required which capture human expert knowledge.
Real-time Monitoring - Performance Management systems sometimes do not handle real-time performance data where Threshold Crossing Alarms (TCA’s) can be triggered. Sometimes only historical data is captured and reported upon. Other solutions can only plot real-time metrics but again no TCA’s are triggered according to KPI/KQI formulas and thresholds.
Complex KPI/KQI Definitions - Complex mathematical calculations are required so that formulas can be applied to KPI/KQI’s to be monitored effectively.
Trend Analysis - Performance trends can often seem haphazard - hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly moving averages are required for effective monitoring of overall trends to be proactive.
High Availability and lack of Fault-Tolerance - Management systems are still architected with primary and secondary HA clusters. Failover times are unacceptable.
Lack of visibility to Service and Customer Impact - How to identify customers and services potentially impacted due to changes in the network, to analyze the root cause of problems impacting end-to-end services, to re-use service components as a reference for new service designs

Solution

A single Fault Management or Performance Management solution is not enough and will not provide a clear view into root cause analysis of IPTV solutions.

For IPTV a total Service Assurance solution is required.

OSSera’s IPTV probe partnership combined with OSSera’s Service Quality Management functions are required to resolve both Set-Top-Box, Middleware, Video Channel Quality, and other possible problems.

OSSera’s Unified Management and Data Modeling tool brings together all probe, event, and metrics into a single framework for fault, performance, service quality, and modeling of network topology for root cause analysis.

OSSera's OSS Explorer Platform is unique because of its multi-threaded symmetrically distributed architecture which can provide a 99.999% Fault-Tolerant Service Assurance monitoring solution.

There are different Phases that can be leveraged using this component based approach to End-to-End Service Assurance:

Scenario 1: Probes feed data into the OSSera Service Assurance solution
Scenario 2: Probes with Network Topology feed the Service Assurance solution. Network topology can be imported from an existing Inventory system.
Scenario 3: Probes, Network Topology, and fault alarms can be gathered from network elements, Element Management Systems (EMS), or existing fault management systems via OSSera’s Data Mediation Platform (DMP).
Scenario 4: Probes, Network Topology, fault events, and performance metrics can be gathered from network elements, EMS, or existing performance management systems via OSSera’s DMP.

Download our latest solution brochure to see how OSSera can help.

Green IT - Billions of kWh's and Counting!

2012-04-09T18:34:31Z

Green IT is a major concern for service providers as they look forward to storing more content, managing and monitoring the resources required to operate these data centers, networks, and services. More mobile and broadband content is being stored in the cloud by the minute. We have SaaS, IaaS, BaaS, xaaS.... continuing to drive a worldwide need for significant investment in the cloud.

Problem Statement from "Introduction to Green IT" :

Why Data Centers?*

Highly energy-intensive and rapidly growing
Consume 10 to 100 times more energy per square foot than a typical office building
Large potential impact on electricity supply and distribution
Used about 45 billion kWh in 2005
At current rates, power requirements could double in 5 years.

Is Green Software Possible?

“More efficient, 'greener' coding strategies could also come from developments in high performance computing.

The requirement to devise smarter software to exploit parallel, multiprocessor architectures will inevitably mean more efficient use of hardware resources and better coding techniques all round.

It could even mark a return to the obsessions of an earlier age of software development when resources were scarce - when, indeed, hardware was big, energy inefficient and expensive.” P. Manchester, The Register, UK

Researcher Nabs $500k to work on "Green Software":

”… if your data center's energy bill is 10% of your operational cost, it makes sense for programmers to write code that will save energy." David Liu, BYU - from Fast Company

Example:

For example why buy a 16 CPU server and run software that only leverages 1 CPU...
You are wasting the energy required to run 15 CPU's sitting idle...
Case Study: OSSera's SM runs on the same server as existing software which under utilizes the server...
- OSSera's Platform Architecture supports a more green OSS Server Configuration by fully utilizing idle CPU's.
- The OSSera OSS Explorer Platform has the ability to load balance and maximize server processing due to its symmetrically distributed architecture.

OSSera's Approach and Commitment to Green IT

View more PowerPoint from ossera

Look for major energy savings...

Idle Servers and CPU cores: Some OSS software systems were archtected prior to multi-threaded and symmetrically distributed architectures and concepts. Systems can be over 10 to 20 years old and have not been overhauled. Rearchitecting software from a single-threaded to a multi-threaded solution is often cost prohibitive and technically not feasible without signficant investment. Therefore monitor CPU cores, memory usage, overall efficiency of your OSS... note that for ongoing service expansion to 4G, Cloud, CE/ME, etc... ongoing OSS business transformation is required.
Data Collection and Mediation Servers (aka Gateway Servers): An OSS usually runs on 1 or 2 servers... but data collection servers could take up 20 or more servers and this is the major cost savings in energy. Since OSSera's Data Mediation Platform is also symmetrically distributed, consolidation of hardware can be applied at the gateway processing level too.
Performance Management Servers: Furthermore legacy Performance Management systems which leverage 5, 10, 20, or more servers can greatly be consolidated by leveraging a symmetrically distributed high performance computing architecture like OSSera's Unified Performance Management platform.
Customer Experience Management Servers: 2012 and beyond is the year for Service Providers to mine and get the most out of the data they have and additional data through probes. This data is hundreds of GB's and requires tremendous high computing power. For real-time dashboards and analysis of this data a solid and efficient high performance computing architecture is required like OSSera's CEM.

For an ROI - look over your existing OSS infrastructure... how many servers do you need to run your existing FM/PM/SM, etc? How many CPU's are idle?... then look for ways to leverage OSSera's platform to more efficiently manage this to reduce your kWh count.

*Reference: Introduction to Green

Greening the Data Center: The IT Industry's Energy Efficiency Imperative

View more presentations from digitallibrary

About Green IT and Cloud Computing 2.0 Summit

Green IT Summit 2012 is a one day conference that begins on April 18 and brings together leaders from the private and public sectors to transform the ideas around sustainable information technology generated during the 2010 GreenGov Symposium into actionable plans. It also provides a forum to forge the strategic alliances and partnerships necessary to realize the promise of sustainable IT for federal, state and local agencies.

Connecting the Dots for End-to-End Service Management

2012-04-05T00:37:34Z

What is special about OSSera?

We can look at multiple key differentiators with OSSera:

But fundamentally it is the Service Management approach. OSSera has a unique approach which is different from what others are saying in the market.

What are others saying?

By referencing the TMF eTOM we've simplified the map for the sake of discussion. Other traditional solutiions are represented below and positioned in black arrows:

horizontally in the Resource Domain and Service Domain.
vertically in the Strategy, Infrastructure, Product (SIP) and Operations business process domains.

What we see in the industry is a wide array of solutions that CSPs have already installed or can purchase from various OSS vendors. There are traditional bottom-up resource management products including:

Inventory
Fault Management
Performance Management
Probes and Agents

All provide some key functionality at the resource level. Some have extended up in the last decade into the Service Management domain but still have not connected the dots very well. Each is still a silo'd solution and it is very difficult to manage services end-to-end. Probes and Agents typically provide metrics at the end-user level (i.e.: mobile wireless smartphone, PC, or home IPTV service) valuable for Customer Experience Management yet may not provide the core end-to-end view into a complex service offering. Probes and Agents do provide a top-down approach to service management through the customer experience.

What is OSSera's Approach?

OSSera is less bottom-up or top-down but more

left to right...
SIP Planning to Operations.
This focus is less managing every single resource and more every single service.
The focus is less fault versus performance management to more service management
Less Inventory Management but leveraging inventory data to create nodes, node groups, and network paths which are critical to a Service Sequence.
Not just Service Impact but also Service Sequence and Service Topology first

OSSera enables SIP:

Strategy - What Services are most important and have the greatest ARPU?
Infrastructure - What nodes, node groups and network paths impact those Services?
Product - What Service Sequence Diagrams and Topology Diagrams are required to model these complex services?

then OSSera enables Operations... both SIP and Operations in a Unified Data Model (UDM)

The OSSera approach involves a primary focus on the Service Management Domain and Service Planning tools. These rich Service Specification and Catalog planning tools allow a planner to create service impacting nodes, node groups, and network paths which are glued together with a Service Sequence, Topology, and Impact diagram for critical Customer-Facing and Network-Facing Services.

Then everything is modeled and stored in the Unified Data Model (UDM) connecting the points across all services.

Also the UDM is the glue between organizations from the SIP Planning teams to the Operational stakeholders. All service diagrams, node groups, nodes, and network paths are now accessible to the Operation teams with real-time alert status indicators. Real-time events, threshold crossing alarms, as well as KPI/KQI metrics are available to the Operational teams to determine Service Problem, Service Quality, and Service Impact Analysis.

This is the fundamental difference with OSSera's solution:

Connecting the Dots across Service and Resource Management silos
Connecting the Dots across SIP to Operational organizations

Download our latest Case Study where we are managing over 2000+ wireless and broadband services for the largest mobile service provider in Thailand.

OSSera is nominated for the Pipeline Innovation Award

2012-03-29T21:26:36Z

OSSera has been nominated for the 2012 Pipeline Innovation Awards in the following categories:

Best Product Innovation, and
Best Deployment

...recognizing OSSera's OSS deployment for Service Planning and Monitoring of over 2000+ services - See Case Study.

Pipeline's innovation awards recognize the top innovators for advancements in the following communications technology categories:

Innovations in Customer Experience Management (CEM)
Cloud Innovation
Advancements in Video
Innovations in Networking
Technical Innovation
Best Ecosystem
Product Innovation
Advanced Connectivity
Best Deployment
Most Innovative Company

The 2012 Innovation Awards are a regenesis of Pipeline's former awards program and have been met with great enthusiasm and excitement throughout the global communications industry. Over 100 nominations have been submitted for well over 50 companies within the 10 innovation categories.

Carrier Ethernet Commitment

2012-03-11T04:43:41Z

OSSera is committed to a broad set of technologies and solutions supported by the OSSera platform including:

Mobile and Broadband Content Aggregators
Leased-Line Services Management
CE/ME - Carrier Ethernet and Metro Ethernet Services
IP-RAN Service Management
LTE/4G and 3G Customer Experience Management

Carrier Ethernet (CE) is at the center of this transformation. CE uses the resiliancy of ethernet with the carrier qualities of SDH. CE is a VPN replacement and access to internet and IP-VPN services. The Metro layer needs to be highly available. Carriers needs to differentiate themselves and convergence is driving change.

MPLS & Ethernet WC in Paris

Mobile Backhaul Testing

Ciena at the Cable Show

What is Carrier Ethernet?

This blog will be an introduction to the OSSera solutions that will be discussed in upcoming blogs from our CTO David Deng.

Mobile Customer Experience Management (CEM) and High Performance Computing

2012-02-28T09:09:07Z

In previous blogs we discussed the goals and industry definitions around Customer Experience Management (related CEM blogs). OSSera's Customer Experience Manager functional architecture includes the following from the bottom up:

Data Collection - leveraging the OSSera adapters to collect and normalize data (such as xDR, syslog, performance matric, etc) from different data sources.
Data Indexing - messages are indexed appropriately such as by customer group.
Data Mining - for quickly and effectively finding valuable data.
Data Warehouse – Large volumes of data are processed efficiently stored for hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or any user-defined time reports.
Data Correlation - Filtering, suppression, and correlation logic is applied where appropriate for real-time and on-demand.
Administration Tool - used to modify the above items.
Reports –present customer experience.
OSS Interfaces - such as integration to existing CRM, Service Management, and SLA

We recently started working with a CSP which has two probe vendors for Wireless xDR processing. Sample data was downloaded for a relatively short period (~1 week) and this was around 1Teribyte of data. Processing xDR data requires tremondous high computer power and we believe OSSera's symmetrically distributed load balanced platform is the key to enabling high performance computing for CEM.

Download our latest brochure for more information on OSSera's CEM:

GSMA World Congress Blogs

2012-03-03T00:54:20Z

Live Broadcasting Link: Mobile World Live

Complete tour of MWC in 3 minutes! from TelcoProfessionals on Vimeo.

GSMA MWC from TelcoProfessionals on Vimeo.

Analyst views on first 36 hours of MWC. from TelcoProfessionals on Vimeo.

Mobile World Congress 2011 was by all accounts a record-breaking year:

Highest-ever total attendance: more than 60,000
Largest-ever senior-level audience: more than 58%
Highest-ever number of CEOs in attendance: more than 3,000
Largest-ever number of exhibitors: 1,400
Largest-ever number of press: 2,900+ press members representing 1,500 media outlets
Largest-ever gathering of Mobile App Developers: more than 12,000

Year over year, the GSMA Mobile World Congress attracts the largest number and highest-quality attendees of any event in the mobile industry. And true to our name, this is truly a global event: attendees came from 200 countries from around the world.

OSSera is looking forward to keynotes, speakers, and analysis on this event. OSSera's Service Strategy, Infrastructure, and Product Planning framework for more effective, available, and flexible Service Monitoring is the key to business transformation. Operational Support Systems will not be a key focus of the GSMA Mobile World Conference but it will definitely be an underlying enabler for the mobile services of today and tomorrow.

For more information see what we are doing for AIS Thailand, the leading mobile and broadband content service provider in Thailand with over 2000+ services and 30 million mobile subscribers. See Case Study.

Also please see our CEM blog series which defines CEM both in the general perspective and the more specific industry perspective as it pertains to xDR probe data collection, indexing, data mining, and analysis for Customer Experience and QoS.

"Far more than a mere communication device, mobiles now serve as our books, health monitors, payment transfer devices, social connectors and tour guides. Mobile technology is embedded in our cars, homes, appliances, governments and utilities. Mobile is enhancing and expanding education and thus, transforming the world. Mobile World Congress 2012 will celebrate the current state of mobile and offer a glimpse into where mobile has the potential to go next." GSMA World Conference, 2012

TMF Management World Asia 2012 - OSSera presenting Case Study

2012-02-15T21:28:25Z

Tmf mw asia-2012-ossera-mimo

View more presentations from ossera.

We are honored to be selected to share our Case Study at TMF Management World Asia. David Deng, CTO and co-founder of OSSera, Inc. will be presenting with our customer.

Track 2: Leveraging Frameworx and Best Practices for Effective Business and IT Operations

Tuesday, February 7th, 5:30 - 5:50 PM

Using Frameworx in Implementing a Unified Service Management Tool –Improving Organizational Collaboration and Communication

Examining the drivers for developing a Unified Service Management Tool to improve business processes at the service level in the Strategy, Infrastructure, and Product (SIP) area as well as Operations.

Outlining the development of an enterprise-wide Service Management application, which enabled solidification of the Service Development and Management processes in the SIP area and Service Management and Operation processes

Quantifying the benefits in terms of information sharing, process unification/implementation, cost saving and revenue increasing in service management

SPEAKERS:

Suphachet Phermphoonwatanasuk, Senior Architect, MIMO Technologies, a subsidary of AIS, Thailand (Dr. Joe)

Fazhong Deng, CTO and Founder, OSSera, Inc

David Fazhong Deng, Co-Founder & CTO, Chairman of the Board

David has over 20 years of experience in software architecture and building teams. He co-founded OSSera, Inc in 2007 based in Davis, California and has been the Chairman of the Board & CTO since then. Prior to that, David had worked for Objective System Integrators and Agilent Technologies for more than 10 years as Senior Software Engineer and Software Architect. David graduated with a M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Nebraska. David continues to contribute to many high-tech forums. He is a respected member of the Telecom Management Forum (TMF) and continues to lead OSSera, Inc. in building products that meet the TMF Frameworx standards.

February 7-8, 2012
Pan Pacific Hotel, Singapore

The Asian communications market is fast evolving, and service providers are facing more challenges than ever before as they look to sustain growth and meet the ever-changing needs of their customers. Amid falling ARPU for voice, a growing gap between data services and revenues, network and service convergence, strong competition, and impending market saturation, how can service providers navigate these obstacles and come out on top?

Now in its fourth year, TM Forum’s Management World Asia 2012 is the only Asian event that bring together leaders from the global communications industry to explore how service providers can transform to enable operational efficiency and innovation in new services through two full days of inspiring presentations, unrivaled networking, and critical education.

A new era in OSS

2012-01-25T18:00:30Z

As we look back at 2011 it seems all the pieces have been falling into place.

One by one we have seen the right partners, the right people, the right technology come together. You can feel it when the chemistry is just right in any relationship. Business is based upon the right relationships:

Customers - Number one in our book is to help all our customers with business transformation.
Partners - Each and every one of our partners is important to us. A win/win relationship as we grow together.
Analysts/Journalists - Appreciating their wisdom and expertise in getting the message out.
Standards - can no longer be an afterthought - we must ground ourselves in the language of business transformation and we appeciate the dedicated team at TMF.
Team - Unending thanks for trusted OSSera team members and their sacrifices.

It is a new era in OSS and you can feel it in your bones.

Happy Holidays and a healthy and prosperous new year 2012!

Welcome to the Year of the Dragon!

The OSSera Team

Customer Experience and Social Networking: Customer Churn for all to see!

2012-01-04T03:13:35Z

Customer Experience Management was discussed in our previous blog as we looked at how our platform helps users with Service Usage data analysis aross customers.

"Customer Experience" is a much broader function in any company and this blog addresses some aspects from a social perspective.

As we launch into 2012 we realize that it is becoming more and more important to focus on Service and Customer management which is a critical reason many CSPs are looking for flexible OSS solutions. Business transformation is no longer an option but a requirement to compete in today's market where services can be obtained Over-The-Top.

How can a CSP differentiate their services? Quality? Quantity? Content? Customer Experience?

Network Management and Resource Management provides visibility to availability and quality of your network layer. Resource Management is very important however management of customers is what makes the immediate impact on the business. Typically fault and performance management solutions alone do not provide enough insight into Customers and how they view their services. This is the primary gap which OSSera is trying to fill with our Service Manager and Customer Experience Management solutions.

CSPs demand more than Fault Management. Recent trends in the area of assurance show that service providers are searching for an end-to-end solution.

Solutions which are not just fault, but fault and performance,
solutions that are not just performance, but service impact,
solutions that are not just service impact, but service quality,
solution that are not just service quality, but service level management,
solutions that are not just service level management, but customer experience management

Can one solution provide all of the above?

This is a lot to ask for from any existing point solution, probe, framework, etc... In the last two decades from 1992 to 2012 there have been point products and there have been frameworks. But all specialize in a particular functional area. One specializes in fault management, another in service quality...

CSPs are demanding innovation from their suppliers!

But the more RFx's we see, and the more CSPs we talk to, the general trend is that is not good enough. CSPs want everything, end-to-end, the "kitchen sink". CSPs want a unified solution. We'll reserve this topic for another blog and switch back to Customer Churn....

Even more than the OSS many CSPs are being very innovative with the way they manage the social networks that can be both very damaging and very helpful to their service.

Customer Churn for all to see...

Today more than ever there is a need to manage "Customer Churn" because Churn is not just something you see when someone cancels their services... Today "Customer Churn" is shared across various Social Networking communities like blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and other online communities, etc...

The damage from one outage, one bad Set-Top-Box, one dropped call, can be magnified as social networks spread the word about your service. Too often we see a new Facebook page "I hate my XYZ service"... with 1000's of followers.

Here are some insightful presentations shared on Slideshare which show how service providers are trying to work with social networks to promote their brand.

"Where is the Love? How SingTel uses Social Media for Customer Service & Support"

How SingTel Uses Social Media for Customer Support

View more presentations from Miguel Bernas

Dr. Natalie Petouhoff ROI Of Social Media Social Media Club Presentation/ Forrester Research

View more presentations from Dr Natalie Petouhoff

We'll followup this blog with more content on OSSera's IPTV End-to-End Service Assurance offering.

OSSera Wikipedia

2011-12-01T02:34:38Z

OSSera's new Wikipedia Page.

TMF MWA 2011: OSSera Announces SQM 2.1 Empowering Service Planning (Free Download)

2011-11-04T15:27:57Z

SACRAMENTO – 8 Nov 2011: OSSera, Inc. today announced Service Quality Manager (SQM) release 2.1. The Service Management framework has been enhanced to empower Value-Added-Service (VAS) planners by allowing them to model service blueprints remotely. Also with OSSera’s Unified Performance Management the framework can manage and monitor KPI/KQI’s, apply dynamic baselines, generate Threshold Crossing Alarms (TCA’s), and monitor service quality.

Value-Added-Services are planned daily and nightly by service and engineering planning. . Due to security issues, travel, and other roadblocks they do not always have access to the main server to access data from the OSSera Service Planning application so they required the ability to draw up service blueprints offline and then upload and map the new blueprints to managed resources the next morning in the office. SQM 2.1 can now empower over 50 planners to model over 2000+ Service Models on their laptops without requiring access to the host. Service blueprints stored locally will synch up automatically when connected with the central object model database and then can be deployed into operations for monitoring.

With these tools users can design their services with the following blueprint diagrams including:

Service Flow (Sequence) Diagrams,
Service Path (Topology) Diagrams,
Network Path Diagrams, and
Service Impact Diagrams.

OSSera will provide complimentary downloadable copies of the Service Planning tools to TeleManagement Forum (TMF) members following Management World Americas 2011. (Sign up for our Newsletter with a TMF, Analyst, CSP, NEM, or SI corporate email to qualify for this free download.)

"OSSera has a unique approach to Service Management by first focusing on the eTOM Strategy, Infrastructure, and Product business processes for Operational Readiness." said David Deng, CTO and co-founder, OSSera, Inc., "The same blueprint diagrams are then deployed into OSSera’s OSS Explorer, a symmetrically distributed multi-threaded runtime platform providing 99.999% availability in monitoring services."

“We want to support the TMF community by providing OSSera’s Service Planning tools. We are first going to seed our tools with example diagrams before we release them to the TMF community. Please sign up on our website for the OSSera Newsletter so we can notify you when the software download is ready”, Mingxia Zhang, CEO of OSSera, Inc.

“We want to thank the TMF for selecting our SQM Case Study to be featured in the TMF Case Study Handbook 2012. We also look forward to presenting at Management World Asia 2012 and possibly Madrid, Spain as well. Thank you TMF for all your support. Please contact us below to schedule a meeting.”, Andrew Lee, VP of Marketing, OSSera, Inc.

Follow OSSera on Twitter @ossera

OSSeraTV Youtube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/osseratv

Contact:

Andrew Lee

916-290-9300

andrew_lee@ossera.com

About Us - OSSera, Inc. is a global provider of Operational Support System (OSS) solutions for IT organizations, service planning, service operations, and network operations. OSSera's multi-threaded symmetrically distributed platform fully leverages modern multi-core server hardware to provide higher flexibility, reliability, availability and scalability for service and resource management solutions. OSSera's products support the TM Forum's Frameworx suite of standards especially in the area of Service Management, Fault Management, Performance Management, Data Mediation, and Configuration Management.

Executive Brief: OSSera Customer Experience Management

2012-02-24T17:04:01Z

Customer Experience Management (CEM) has been described in various ways from the broader aspect of ordering, billing and B2B/B2C relationships to the technology experience with the actual services delivered by a communication service provider (CSP). In this blog series we will look at CEM and the actual customer experience with the service technology.

Challenges:

How does a CSP monitor and measure true customer experience of the services delivered? - Today a bottom-up network to service model does not capture the experience of individual customers.
How does a CSP plan and model individual customers? - Modeling customers can require millions if not ten's of millions of managed objects in a database. This may take hours to model and hours to load into any runtime system.
How does a CSP monitor and measure customer service usage data which requires a huge amount of processing power? Solutions for service usage data processing requires tremendous scalability and throughput.

Different Customer Experience Data Sources:

Disclaimer: Monitoring the Customer Experience of your service is often bordering upon privacy issues. Each CSP must take this into account based upon their internal policies and set clear rules to ensure privacy is maintained. Approaches below describe how the customer experience data can be gathered. OSSera's position is that we have the platform to process the data whatever the source, however we either partner or work with your service usage data sources to process and analyze it against your service models.

Agent Approach - Some vendors offer an agent which resides upon the set-top-box (STB), smartphone, or broadband laptop. These agents provide a view into what are the KPI's upon that device. Metrics are collected and stored in a database and thresholds can be set against KPI/KQI's. The challenge is the agents are only running when the device is being used, and therefore data is intermittant. It provides a good set of data for Customer Care to spotlight the problem but usually does not give the root cause.
Call Usage Data Approach - Call Detail Records (CDR) or SMDR (Station Management Detail Records) are generated for each telephone call from the switch and pieced together to form a billing record. CDR/SMDR records contain the originating, terminating Telephone Number (TN), duration, and any information that may be used for billing (i.e.: Telephone Card usage, Long Distance, Inter/Intra-exchange). CDR/SMDR can be used to look at Service Usage. The challenge is this typically looks at voice call service and only calls that are completed. Calls that did not complete may be thrown away during processing if analysis takes place after the billing record is created.
Signaling Usage Data Approach - xDR's are captured and correlated by signaling probes. Various signaling probe vendors have probes which capture the protocol stack (i.e.: GSM, GPRS, UMTS, PSTN, VoIP, NGN, CDMA, and W-LAN) signaling data. The xDR has a wealth of condition codes that can be leveraged to analyze network, service, and customer quality. The challenge is the cost of probes can be high and also the volume of signaling records may be hundreds of times greater than Call Detail Records. xDR's will include SMS, MMS, and the individual set-up communication signals.

OSSera's Solution:

OSSera's solution encompasses the OSS explorer platform and its symmetrically distributed architecture to be able to process data at high volumes. It also involves the Data Mediation Platform which can process the incoming data records. Let's look at the three main questions discussed earlier.

How does a CSP monitor and measure true customer experience of the services delivered?

As noted above the the OSSera OSS Explorer CEM solution requires data from an agent, switch, or probe. Each has its pros and cons however the data can be processed and analyzed.

How does a CSP plan and model individual customers?

With OSSera you do not need to model every single customer but has a feature which allows a single managed object to represent millions of customer nodes or node groups. This way the model is much simpler to model and much quicker to start and load. This is a unique feature of our Service Planning and Modeling tools which are extended up to model the customer device.

The OSSera platform does however allow you to model individual customers if you choose to because of its flexible data model. Business customers can be modeled. For example we are working on leased line services and these services can be modeled with a direct one to one link to business customers.

How does a CSP monitor and measure customer service usage data which requires a huge amount of processing power?

To date our xDR processing and data mining benchmarks have been extremely well received.

"Real-time applications are supported by the high performance and symmetrically distributed nature of the platform. When the data volume is relatively low, a single instance of the platform and application logic can handle the load. When the data volume is higher than what a single instance can handle, it can be handled by simply running another instance. Data sources can be split based upon the application logic and processed data can be re-joined later such as through a correlation. Application components/objects are inserted at any point to meet the needs. The flexibility of the process flow tool and execution environment makes it easy to do.

High volume data applications need the help of data warehousing algorithms to quickly generate dynamic user reports. Again the flexibility of the platform is a tremendous help.

Benchmarks show that the throughput of OSSera's CEM system can handle more than 4K data records in less than 300 ms on a linux machine (duo 2 core - AMD Opteron 2212 at 2.0G, 2.4T 7KRPM Sata II, 4G memory)." David Deng, CTO and co-founder, OSSera, Inc.

If you are looking at an end-to-end CEM and SQM solution, please contact us for more details.

Download our brochure for more information on OSSera's CEM:

OSSera delivers Element Management System to Network Element Manufacturer

2011-12-24T14:30:05Z

Download our latest EMS Brochure

OSSera's OSS Explorer platform is being leveraged by an Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON) hardware manufacturer as an Element Management System (EMS). See excerpts from wikipedia below:

An element management system (EMS) consists of systems and applications for managing network elements (NE) on the network element management layer (NEL) of the Telecommunications Management Network(TMN) model.

As recommended by ITU-T, the element management system's key functionality is divided into five key areas - fault, configuration, accounting, performance and security (FCAPS). Portions of each of the FCAPS functionality fit into the TMN models. On the northbound the EMS interfaces to network management systems and or service management systems depending on the deployment scenario. southbound the EMS talks to the devices...

An EMS is a carrier class management solution. It is capable of scaling as the network grows, maintaining high performance levels as the number of network events increase, and providing simplified integration with third-party systems. It meets the service providers' expectations for integrated operational support systems.

OSSera has streamlined the OSS Explorer platform to focus on meeting this need.

Challenges:

The high cost of development and support
Software is not a hardware vendor's core business
Scalability as the CSP puts the EMS into operation
Single point of failure - an EMS becomes the bottleneck and is sometimes bypassed because it is the single point of failure in management.
Future growth of the EMS for other hardware models
Deployment - Ease of deployment on low cost hardware such as Linux servers
Upgrades - the need for transparent upgrades
Reusability - the ability to quickly reuse business logic and components across the hardware suite.
Northbound interface support for higher level OSS management requirements
Southbound protocols and data mediation

Solution:

OSSera's EMS solution has the following key components highlighted below.

First is Fault Management specific to the hardware vendor's needs as well as Alarm forwarding.

Configuration is shown above with topology views, device panels, a rich icon library, link styling, and cut-through to the device for Man-Machine Language interaction. Configuration functions also include:

Upgrade and Backup of device configurations.
Batch process management and FTP server configuration.

Also included in the EMS solution are the following functions:

Performance,
Authorizations,
Log Monitoring,
Administration Tasks (Backup/Restore, Log maintenance, etc.), and
Instant Messaging.

Key takeaways:

Runs on Linux for lower TCO
MySQL Database support as well as Oracle
Scalable architecture
Transparent upgrades
99.999% availability due to symmetrical distribution
Reusable components
Custom business logic can be added
Less than 300MB software footprint

If you are a Network Element Vendor, Probe Vendor, or other Hardware Manufacturer, please contact us for more details.

Download our latest EMS Brochure

Advanced Troubleshooting - a Unified Approach to Resource and Service Problem Management

2011-11-03T19:15:21Z

Troubleshooting can be very complex. Service Level Agreements specify critical Mean-Time-To-Repair (MTTR) objectives which must be met. Call Center, NOC, and Engineering costs need to be managed and time spent on troubleshooting can be very time consuming. A unified approach to resource and service problem management is required.

Problem:

Troubleshooting problems can take time and has a direct impact on Customer Satisfaction and MTTR.
Often hold times for customers can be several minutes and is very costly to OpEx as this equates to more Customer Care reps to handle call volumes
Sometimes the knowledge for troubleshooting resides only in a few experts within the Call Center, NOC, Field, and Engineering.
Troubleshooting and testing may extend for several days as automated tests are required for NOC Engineers and Support.
Call Centers can be distributed geographically and very large in number - authorized access is required.
Role-Specific commands are required

Solution:

OSSera's OSS Explorer platform is being leveraged across 1700+ Customer Care users for Advanced Troubleshooting (AT) of ADSL. Below is a process flow:

Users will Call into the Call Center Operator - The NOC Engineer also has role-specific authorized access to the AT interface for troubleshooting.
The Call Center Operator has access to the the AT interface to access role-specific authorized troubleshooting commands. A ticket may be openned and passed to the NOC Engineer for further troubleshooting.
Commands are selected on the client and triggered to run on the OSS Explorer multi-threaded symmetrcially distributed platform. Scheduling of commands is also available.
The DSLAM/EMS equipment are tested
The user at home is also checking on the ADSL modem per direction from the Call Center Operator to make sure it is appropriately connected.
The ADSL Modem is connected to the DSLAM/EMS and results are fed back to the NOC or Call Center Operator
The DSLAM is connected out to the Internet successfully after troubleshooting.

Below is a high-level view of the CRM Tier 1 Call Center interface.

Also below is a view of the NOC role-specific AT interface.

Scheduling troubleshooting commands will help to resolve intermittant problems and also time sensative issues during peak hours.

Key takeaways on our AT solution:

1000's of Clients supported
99.999% symmetrically distributed system
multi-threaded
transparent upgrades
Secure authorized client application
Role-specific interfaces
Experience and support for various ADSL vendors.
- Alcatel ATM & IP
- Datang
- Fujitsu ATM ST1AC, IP GbeTrunk, IMA 8, IMA 16, STM1 8, STM1 16
- Huawei ATM/IP 5600v2/v3/v3R2, ATM/IP 5605, ATM/IP MSAN, IPAG
  Hyundai
- LG
- Lucent ATM/IP
- Marconi ATM/MSAN
- NEC
- Turbo Comm
- ZTE ATM/MSAN

The key components of AT include:

OSS Explorer - see Technology
Data Mediation Platform
Advanced Troubleshooting GUI (shown above), Server, Authorization and Schedular

Beyond ADSL broadband, OSSera is working with other projects (i.e.: mobile, and IPTV).

Versatile Data Mediation Platform

2011-11-23T20:57:49Z

OSSera Data Mediation Platform provides a set of drag and drop components to process:

incoming alarms, metrics, Call/Signaling Data Records, Inventory Retrieval, and
bi-directional command and response interactions (i.e.: Testing, Activating, Re-configurating, Pings, etc...)

The Data Mediation Platform has collectors for standard interfaces as well as tools for users to develop user-specific data collectors. These data collectors can collect and process data in any format. For example, OSSera's Fault Management framework uses these alarm data collectors to collect and pre-process raw alarm data from NE/EMS/NMS or any other entities.

Multi-Protocol

OSSera's Data Mediation Platform (DMP) supports SNMP, Socket, File, and Corba with supporting Managed Information Base (MIB) Loading tools and ID/Parse rules for non-SNMP protocols. Data from various protocols are normalized into a standardized Flow Builder.

Flow Builder

Flow Builder is a drag and drop tool which allow the user to create states. States model the input, ID, Parse, and Error states of the data flow. Also users can model output, final, transition, and final states of the flow. This streamlines the process in managing resources across a wide domain.

Control Flow

Action States are implemented for applications such as Advanced Troubleshooting where commands are sent to various managed resources for testing, pings, and retrieving data.

Debugging Mode

From experience the process in managing Data Mediation can be painfully cumbersome. Debugging features have been added including breakpoints, stepping, value checks, and flow animation to make sure DMP functions have been implemented correctly in building adapters.

Deploy and Execute Flows

Flows are packaged and can be installed with an installer for ease of distribution across a carrier's network. Once deployed they can be executed to run.

A Unified Data Mediation Platform

Using the OSSera platform as a foundation the DMP automates interactions critical for Advanced Troubleshooting, Fault Management, Performance Management, Service Problem Management, Service Quality Management, Inventory Retrieval/Resource Management, and Customer Experience Management/CDR Service Usage Management.

OSSera's Data Mediation Platform Brochure

OSSera Tackles Fault-Tolerant Fault Management - don't skip a beat

2011-11-03T07:14:45Z

OSSera's OSS Explorer Platform is unique because of its multi-threaded symmetrically distributed architecture which can provide a 99.999% Fault-Tolerant Fault Management monitoring solution.

Unlike other monitoring solutions which have a High Availability add-on component, OSSera's OSS Explorer platform does not have a Primary and Secondary system architecture, therefore there is no Secondary system that must be kept in synch with the Primary.
Unlike other monitoring solutions which have a Hot and/or Cold Standby system, OSSera's OSS Explorer platform does not have any transition time between the runtime production system to a Hot and/or Cold Standby system.

These industry options are common to High Availability Clusters (HAC). In summary HAC's are groups of computers that support server applications (i.e.: mission-critical fault management software applications) that can be reliably utilized with minimum down-time. HAC's detect hardware/software faults, and immediately restart the application on another system without requiring administrative intervention, a process known as failover (see HAC definition from wikipedia below).

Fault-Tolerance

Unlike High Availability Clusters, A fault-tolerant system must be architected to just continue to run without skipping a beat.

Unlike High Availability Clusters, A fault-tolerant system does not have a failover system that is restarted.

A fault-tolerant system is designed from the ground up for reliability...

OSSera's Fault Management architecture is built upon OSS Explorer which has been designed from the ground up to be fault-tolerant due to its unique ability to distribute processing across a multi-server/multi-core virtualized environment and shift the load transparently based upon available processors and servers.

Therefore based upon the definitions below, fault-tolerance is even more reliable and available than High Availability because a Fault-Tolerant system does not have to "resubmit", "restart", and/or "failover" to a secondary system.

Imagine being able to handle disaster recovery, event storms, and maintenance upgrades without skipping a beat. Never lose sight to critical resources and services.

See Related Blog: 99.999% - Myth or Reality?!?

Download the Brochure on Fault Management:

Fault Management (PDF)

Reference: Wikipedia

Fault-tolerance or graceful degradation is the property that enables a system (often computer-based) to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of (or one or more faults within) some of its components. A newer approach is progressive enhancement. If its operating quality decreases at all, the decrease is proportional to the severity of the failure, as compared to a naïvely-designed system in which even a small failure can cause total breakdown. Fault-tolerance is particularly sought-after in high-availability or life-critical systems.

PC Magazine Definition of: fault tolerant

The ability to continue non-stop when a hardware failure occurs. A fault-tolerant system is designed from the ground up for reliability by building multiples of all critical components, such as CPUs, memories, disks and power supplies into the same computer. In the event one component fails, another takes over without skipping a beat.

Tandem and Stratus were the first two manufacturers that were dedicated to building fault-tolerant computer systems for the transaction processing (OLTP) market.

High Availability
Many systems are designed to recover from a failure by detecting the failed component and switching to another computer system. These systems, although sometimes called fault tolerant, are more widely known as "high availability" systems, requiring that the software resubmits the job when the second system is available.

Redundant Hardware
True fault tolerant systems with redundant hardware are the most costly because the additional components add to the overall system cost. However, fault tolerant systems provide the same processing capacity after a failure as before, whereas high availability systems often provide reduced capacity.

Definition of: fault management

The monitoring of error indications in a computer system in order to log the occurrences and send alerts to system administrators and field service. Fault management software keeps track of hardware faults such as memory parity errors and software crashes. The proper analysis of the frequency and type of such errors is intended to initiate a repair order before a total breakdown occurs.

See Related Wiki Pages:

High Availability Clusters (HAC)

High-availability clusters (also known as HA clusters or failover clusters) are groups of computers that support server applications that can be reliably utilized with a minimum of down-time. They operate by harnessing redundant computers in groups or clusters that provide continued service when system components fail. Without clustering, if a server running a particular application crashes, the application will be unavailable until the crashed server is fixed. HA clustering remedies this situation by detecting hardware/software faults, and immediately restarting the application on another system without requiring administrative intervention, a process known as failover. As part of this process, clustering software may configure the node before starting the application on it. For example, appropriate filesystems may need to be imported and mounted, network hardware may have to be configured, and some supporting applications may need to be running as well.

Veritas Clustering:

High availability clusters (HAC) improve availability of applications by failing them over or switching them over in a group of systems as opposed to High Performance Clusters which improve performance of applications by allowing them to run on multiple systems simultaneously.

High Performance Computing (HPC)