Fail fast and fail often The announcement by Ericsson of the complete write down of its next generation BSS “Revenue Manager” and a refocus on its legacy BSS did not surprise us. Ericsson deserve credit for biting the bullet and effectively discontinuing “Revenue Manager”, even if it’s possibly two years late. Appledore believe that the lessons from this are widely applicable. As an industry, we need to stop assuming that “Tomorrow looks like today” and need to create a culture of challenging ideas and avoiding internal “group think”. Active questioning of business model (in response to changes in the market and customers willingness to adopt change) needs to be encouraged and we need to reward willingness to “fail” innovation early. There is a wider industry opportunity to learn from this beyond billing and Ericsson. In areas like “Customer Experience” or 5G the same risks of assuming historic CSP business models and group think apply. We need to avoid these becoming like Revenue Manager. The anticipated customer demand for a full-stack pre-integrated BSS solution has not materialized. We have been tracking the progress of “Revenue Manager” for 5 years and even early on we believed it was targeting a business need that was […]