So this morning I needed to change a temporary password on an Oracle DB. I got a neat error telling me that the password change had failed. On investigation, it turns out that Oracle will not allow a password to begin with a number.
No numbers. Ouch.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
On being floored
This post just floored me, specifically this pair of comments:
Carriers say they'll make up for the lost revenue through fees for the Web access that makes content downloads possible. "The content piece is not as meaningful for service providers as access," says Kevin Packingham, vice-president for product development at Sprint Nextel. "That's what's really going to move the needle." Adds AT&T's chief marketing officer, David Christopher: "We never said these content areas would take over the world."
Au contraire, mon frere VP/CMO. It's all about content. Without content there is no reason to have access, and without sharing the revenue of the content, realizing the investment a carrier has made in the infrastructure to deliver access is going to be very difficult.
The continued challenge for a Service Provider is dealing with how to become a value add service provider, not just the Big Dumb Pipe Provider. If a carrier becomes the latter, it's just a matter of time.
That's the true opportunity IMS/SDP offers for a carrier, and having a unified vision on what elements of the consumer profile will be made available to 3rd parties and what will be kept private to allow value added "sticky" services to be generated, launched and managed is the challenge to solve.
Carriers say they'll make up for the lost revenue through fees for the Web access that makes content downloads possible. "The content piece is not as meaningful for service providers as access," says Kevin Packingham, vice-president for product development at Sprint Nextel. "That's what's really going to move the needle." Adds AT&T's chief marketing officer, David Christopher: "We never said these content areas would take over the world."
Au contraire, mon frere VP/CMO. It's all about content. Without content there is no reason to have access, and without sharing the revenue of the content, realizing the investment a carrier has made in the infrastructure to deliver access is going to be very difficult.
The continued challenge for a Service Provider is dealing with how to become a value add service provider, not just the Big Dumb Pipe Provider. If a carrier becomes the latter, it's just a matter of time.
That's the true opportunity IMS/SDP offers for a carrier, and having a unified vision on what elements of the consumer profile will be made available to 3rd parties and what will be kept private to allow value added "sticky" services to be generated, launched and managed is the challenge to solve.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
On getting it right the first time (Provisioning)
A lot of fluff has been making it into the trade tissues lately about provisioning. "Push the big red button and make the widget go". This is all well and good, but one should be very cognizant of the fact that it's neither that simple nor desirable to just do provisioning. Think of it this way:
You can't spell success without:
Asset Management
Provisioning Catalog
Configuration Management
As it was expressed to me recently, organizations looking to take on Provisioning should learn from what the outsourcers have learned: in order to take over development and support of someone's application, you not only have to know what it is and where it runs, but also what is needed to make it run, how those things are configured and how to make it run.
As such, doing Provisioning without Asset or Configuration Management (or even without connecting to them) is a recipe for disaster. Scaling the provisioning system up without being able to programmatically do Asset or Configuration is simply a non-starter. All your time will be spent working inside Excel to try and track the widgets and ultimately you'll declare failure and go back to doing things the old fashioned way. If you're really unlucky, you'll end up being audited by one of your software vendors, and noone needs that kind of distraction.
You can't spell success without:
Asset Management
Provisioning Catalog
Configuration Management
As it was expressed to me recently, organizations looking to take on Provisioning should learn from what the outsourcers have learned: in order to take over development and support of someone's application, you not only have to know what it is and where it runs, but also what is needed to make it run, how those things are configured and how to make it run.
As such, doing Provisioning without Asset or Configuration Management (or even without connecting to them) is a recipe for disaster. Scaling the provisioning system up without being able to programmatically do Asset or Configuration is simply a non-starter. All your time will be spent working inside Excel to try and track the widgets and ultimately you'll declare failure and go back to doing things the old fashioned way. If you're really unlucky, you'll end up being audited by one of your software vendors, and noone needs that kind of distraction.
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