Podcast

Ep 13 – The Software Series: CSG

February 16, 2021

This week’s guest

Jon Fagan

Senior Principal Cloud Architect CSG

In 2020, CSG, a U.S-based publicly-traded software company, issued a press release that caught my eye. It announced CSG’s Ascendon Rating & Charging, a serverless, cloud-native, SaaS offering architected for AWS. With so many of the topics I talk about on the reg, I knew I had to have CSG on the show.

In this episode, the second in our Software Series, we talk with Jon Fagan, CSG’s Senior Principal Cloud Architect. As a leader in cloud migration and innovation, he’s had a front-row seat to the telecom industry’s journey to the public cloud. Jon talks with me about:

What cloud native means to CSG [3:18];
Why the shift to the public cloud is an all-encompassing, culture-changing event [4:54];
Why CSG decided to partner with AWS for Ascendon Rating and Charging, while also remaining cloud agnostic [5:15];
The tricky business of navigating the telecom industry’s love affair with customizations [10:32];
How CSG tries to find a balance between staying nimble and innovative while being a trusted and responsive partner to telcos [15:07].

Listen to the end of the interview to learn something about Jon that clearly sets him apart from his public cloud peers and to hear my take on the misleading use of the term “SaaS” [16:31].

Links and Resources

You can find the transcript for this episode here.

Take a look at my blog post about why telcos need to stop customizing their software and move to multi-tenant SaaS
Read CSG’s press release announcing Ascendon, CSG’s cloud-native rating and charging solution
Check out what everyone had to say when I posted a tweet that said, “WTF is on-premise SaaS” about this Netcracker press release
Read The New York Times 1996 review of Jon’s performance as Paris in America Ballet Theater’s Romeo and Juliet, and catch him in this video from a 1999 performance of Le Corsaire [0:51 and 7:30]. WOW!

Guest bio

Jon Fagan is Senior Principal Cloud Architect at CSG where he is in charge of public cloud strategy, adoption and standards. He leads the Platform Management and Security teams in CSG’s next-generation platform, Ascendon, and has built CSG’s Public Cloud Practice from ground zero to a company-wide, innovative environment. His partnerships extend to the practitioners at AWS and Microsoft Azure, CSG’s customers, and leading industry experts. He has participated in “How to Adopt Cloud” sessions through multiple companies and industries.

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