By: Scott St. John - Pipeline
Change isn’t always consistent. It comes in waves, rapidly accelerating after intervals of stasis. Harken back to the birth of the interstate highway system. In the US, the Federal-Aid Highway
Act of 1956 had its origins a half-century earlier, born from the idea of providing national infrastructure to get farmers out of the mud and their produce into the market faster. At the time it
was passed, it seemed like an even better idea to support the transport of troops, equipment, and landing of planes in war time…
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By: Dr. Cemal Dikmen, CTO, SS8 Networks
It has been said that nothing is constant except for change. But not all change is the same and the pace of change we are now seeing is very different than what we’ve seen before, presenting
both new opportunities and challenges. The evolution of technologies we’ve seen over the last decade or two has been exponential and is having a compounding effect. We’ve seen dramatic increases in
storage capacity, bandwidth, and computing power. Add to this the evolution of mobile technologies as we quickly progressed from 2G, to now 5G, at an incredible pace…
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By: Ashwath Nagaraj, Scott St. John -
Pipeline
Transformation has now become paramount for every enterprise across virtually every industry. What was once a slow-roll, nice-to-have, or even utopian scenario; quickly became mission critical
in the wake of the global pandemic. The pandemic not only quickly brought to light the necessity of digital transformation, but it also demonstrated the incredible benefits and resulting
impact it had on efficiency, automation, customer experience, profitability, and the ability for companies to survive…
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By: Ari Banerjee
5G represents a gigantic leap forward in networking technology with accelerated transmission, higher bandwidth, massive connectivity and reduced latency. Combining these capabilities with
network slicing and MEC processing offers the potential to revolutionize businesses and transform societies. However, fully employing these new capabilities is impossible unless they are matched by
equally sophisticated mechanisms of orchestration and management. Dynamic 5G services require unprecedented levels of automation with AI-driven OSS functions to utilize the full value of 5G
networks…
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By: Mark Hurley
A successful ransomware attack can be devastating to a business. Organizations caught unprepared could be left with the choice between paying a ransom demand and writing off the stolen data
entirely. In our day-to-day cybersecurity practice, we perform a lot of assessments with new and potential clients. Among this wide variety of professional companies, we find very differing
understanding of the threat that ransomware poses to their businesses. There are the unknowledgeable optimists who believe it will never happen to them…
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By: Valentyn Morozov
Customer service providers want to support their clients in every step of their business journey. In the B2B and B2B2C sectors, supporting clients means they have to deliver excellent service
in the face of any changes, whether their client wants to switch up their business model, add more offer packages, introduce new pricing or adjust for when the business grows. Thus, the flexibility
of all internal operations plays a strategic role in the provider’s value creation process. Unfortunately, fewer than one-third of organizational transformations succeed, according to research by
McKinsey…
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By: Mark Cummings, Ph.D.
A series of recent announcements are signaling a fork in the road for telcos: maintain business as usual or embrace innovation. While change won’t happen overnight, the decisions made now will
determine the future course for telcos. Maintaining ‘business as usual’ condemns today’s telcos to a shrinking social and economic role. Clinging to legacy processes, procedures and thinking will
see the hyperscalers and other competitors cleave off the majority of the network and all of the profitable business…
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By: Mark Mortensen
At the turn of the century, I gave a keynote talk at an IEEE Symposium on “The OSS Millennium Challenges.” In it, I outlined what I saw as the major issues facing operations support systems
(OSS) for communications services providers (CSPs). Here, we look back at how we have done with these challenges: some have been met, some are still with us, and some have been superseded through a
complex set of market dynamics and technological advances. So, by way of this retrospective, let us look back on what concerned us most at the turn of the century and the major challenges we are
facing today and tomorrow in network operations and OSS…
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By: Vinod Kumar
With a wide range of applications at our disposal, why are just a few widely adopted, making those apps a phenomenal success? There is a universal underlying element that determines which apps
become mainstream, and it's trust. Digital trust means knowing that your personal data and payment information is secure, and that your digital data is handled with integrity and accountability.
While being digital enables agility, reliability, new revenue streams, improved customer experience, and the ability to make more informed decisions, it also brings with it vulnerability and
risk…
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By: Ben Edmond
SD-WAN is currently one of the most rapidly expanding areas of the network infrastructure market. What does this mean for network providers trying to stay ahead of the curve? There are several
challenges bearing down on providers as they grow network footprints to support SD-WAN deployments for their clients. To rise above, they’ll need to depend on the emergence of purpose-built
software to create, assemble, and take action on all the intelligence necessary to support SD-WAN proposals for their customer base…
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By: Scott St. John - Pipeline
It’s getting dicey out there. The pandemic rages on, as the world passes a grim milestone of 3 million COVID deaths globally, and patients in hardest-hit regions such as India run out of
hospital space, burial grounds, and oxygen. Businesses have been forced to transform to survive and embrace our new global reality. At the same time, cyberattacks, including those sponsored by
nation states and aimed at medical institutions, are on the rise as geopolitical tensions between China, Russia, and the US heat up…
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By: Scott St. John - Pipeline
Simply put, technology news had real momentum this month. While innovation is always a theme in our industry news column, the flavor of innovation this month appeared to be new and fresh. From
research that captures present perspectives on how the pandemic revved up innovation, to real-time VR teamwork to the increasing use of facial recognition, the industry seems poised to take a leap
into a new chapter in our “next normal.” We also heard from the FCC on efforts to counteract robocalls, from operators on new 5G deployments, and from industry movers and shakers on new
partnerships, alliances, and acquisition…
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