Amdocs last month at Mobile World Congress unleashed a flurry of news and activities, including the release of its CES 10 solution, new relationships with Adobe and frog, a multivendor NFV demonstration with Vodafone, and a study it did with IDC.
In an interview today, Daniela Perlmutter, AMDOCS head of product and solution marketing, told me that CES 10 is a major release that helps its customers address many aspects of digital transformation – from digital commerce, to customer care, to a big data hub with a new B2B offering that automates and orchestrates the process from lead to care of a B2B customer, and all the way down to service agility related to network services. She added that AMDOCS has introduced a new approach, with about 50 out-of-the-box business processes, through which communication service providers can deliver omnichannel customer experiences covering online and in-store environments, diversify their businesses to reach new customers and expand their product portfolios, leverage data to anticipate customer behavior, and become more agile.
“Service providers are increasingly realizing how much progress they need to make to compete as digital service providers,” said Andy Hicks, Research Director, Telecoms and Networking, EMEA at IDC. “Not only do they have to bring products to market much more quickly, they need to integrate their technology and business stacks, and unify their different channels to the customer.”
IDC and AMDOCS partnered to do a recent study, which indicated that half of the decision makers worldwide predict digital transformation will take their organizations longer than 5 years. Perlmutter told me that’s not good news given how quickly business, technology, and the world at large are changing.
That said, AMDOCS suggests that CSPs work to define not just which technology to use, but also what business issues they need to address to enable their digital transformations. AMDOCS can provide the tools and professional services to help with that, she said.
As noted above, service agility will be one key component CSPs will need to address in their digital transformations. To show how it can be done, AMDOCS joined forces at MWC with Vodafone U.K. to demonstrate how to reduce strain on a network via the fast and easy introduction of a firewall (Aria Networks was a partner on this demo as well). The companies also worked with ADVA, Fortinet, and Red Hat to leverage NFV and VNFs to instantiate a new data center, a new link to the data center, and virtualized firewall, all within seconds. And AMDOCS and Vodafone did an IoT demonstration showing how they could quickly activate a Samsung Gear 2 smartwatch and put it on a user’s existing data plan.
Speaking of the Internet of Things, AMDOCS last month introduced an IoT monetization platform. It was designed to enable service providers to expedite the onboarding of enterprise and OEM partners, and bill customers for IoT products and services in various ways. For example, the platform can support IoT services billing providers, IoT services resellers, and white-label IoT scenarios because it can address complex settlements in various models, managing all financial interactions among those involved.
In other recent news, AMDOCS has partnered with Adobe and frog. AMDOCS uses the Adobe Experience Manager, which provides a simple experience for business users at CSPs who need to define new promotions and services on their websites. It’s an easy-to-use, web-based, drop-and-drag kind of tool from Adobe that enables the digital commerce experience for product managers at CSPs to introduce their own promotions and not be reliant on IT staff anymore. Frog, meanwhile, is a design firm that helps customers deliver an attractive and ease-to-use interface for visitors to enjoy in online environments.
Edited by
Stefania Viscusi
