Amdocs announced a major new release of its integrated software package on 19 January 2010, dubbed the ‘Amdocs Customer Experience System (CES) 8’. It represents a further expansion and evolution of the product line as part of Amdocs’ attempt to provide an overall suite of highly advanced, exceptionally scalable OSS, BSS and SDP products that work together to ensure high quality of the sales and back-office customer experience.
Amdocs’ ‘Connected World’ vision
The vision that Amdocs presents is called the ‘Connected World’, whereby trillions of users, both human and machine, communicate ubiquitously and adopt what Amdocs dubs a ‘connected lifestyle’. The software seeks to support what Amdocs believes are the three business models that communications service providers (CSPs) will adopt: the experience model (providing consumers and businesses with an exceptional communications experience), the vertical model (serving particular vertical markets, such as healthcare, education, transportation, SMEs or government), and the partner enabler model (providing the infrastructure for other companies to offer consumer and business services).
Amdocs announced several new and enhanced capabilities as part CES 8 (see Figure 1). As usual, these are provided by a number of different software packages that can be implemented separately or as a unified whole.
Figure 1: New and enhanced features of Amdocs’ CES 8 portfolio [Source: Amdocs and Analysys Mason, 2010]
New products and capabilities
- Customer management:
- retail experience solution – tablet-driven user interface system for sales personnel at retail stores, including product availability, bundle suggestions, and POS integration
- universal storefront – Web 2.0 portal framework for an online store that CSPs can use themselves or provide to third parties
- smart device support – provides CSRs with the ability to discover the device and service information and to run remote smart device diagnostics
- guided selling – capability available to all channels for making personalised suggestions for cross-sales and up-sales, as well as checking compatibility and eligibility to reduce order fallout (this capability will be provided in a later release of CES 8).
- Portfolio management:
- cross-product administration and technology base for common functions across the product line – installation, component integration, security and administration, Linux support and small machine architecture
- product lifecycle management – a programme management solution for creating new product and product bundles
- Service and resource management:
- mobile backhaul capacity management operational product pack – a pre-packaged solution to support backhaul capacity planning for mobile operators, built on the Amdocs network planning offering
- enhanced network planning – the ability to reserve resources has been added to the network planning pack
- configuration management database solution – provides an ITIL-compliant method of storing and managing IT-like data in addition to network component data
- asset management – tracks network and CPE assets, including assignment of workforce responsible.
- Service delivery:
- converged service platform – Amdocs acquired a telecoms application server platform as part of its acquisition of jNetX in October 2009, which Amdocs is positioning as its converged service platform. It is part of Amdocs’ overall service delivery solution, which includes the mobile Internet and personalised mobile portal that came from Amdocs’ acquisition of ChangingWorlds in December 2008.
Enhancements to existing products
- Revenue management:
- convergent billing ‘Turbo Charging’ – provides a real-time charging system that Amdocs says has the scalability and features to accommodate both prepaid and postpaid charging (claims 3300 events per core processor per second running on blade servers with N+1 sparing to achieve 99.999% availability).
- Service and resource management:
- catalogue-driven service delivery – takes information from the standard Amdocs product and service catalogues and transcribes and transforms it into a template for an activation request that is loaded into the Amdocs activation system.
- Service delivery:
- personalised mobile portal solution – uses ChangingWorlds’ personalisation software to provide customers with a customisable interface and context-relevant information via a CSP mobile portal
- mobile Internet solution – generalises the personalised mobile portal solution to profile subscribers’ off-portal content consumption and interests, and provides a personalised browsing experience to the Internet in general.
- BSS implementation pack: a bundle of pre-configured software that includes best current practices, which Amdocs aims to serve as a ‘telco in a box’ solution. It can reportedly be implemented in a trial configuration in two weeks and implemented in four months from scope sign-off to user acceptance testing.
Analysys Mason view
Amdocs CES 8’s capabilities are more evolutionary than revolutionary, primarily providing additional features and functions to increase the Amdocs footprint. These are valuable to established Amdocs customers and give new prospects more reasons to go with Amdocs for an integrated set of capabilities. Yet, with this announcement, Amdocs has not given new prospects a compelling reason to put themselves in Amdocs’ hands for the long term – that would require a more prescriptive, thought-leadership positioning than is evident here.
In the service revenue management space, convergent ‘Turbo Charging’ has the promise of unifying the postpaid and prepaid worlds, allowing Amdocs to deliver additional capabilities more easily and cheaply while decreasing the software, hardware and system administration costs of the separate rating engines that many CSPs have had to deploy.
The customer management functions enhance the CRM and device management capabilities considerably. Such enhancements can be very valuable to increase CSPs’ ‘wallet share’ as they offer more complex and targeted services and equipment bundles to increasingly sophisticated, but confused consumers. See ‘The emergence of integrated mobile CSP-specific retail store management software’ in the September 2009 edition of Analysys Mason’s Telecoms Software CEO Digest for a more complete set of comments on the retail management solution. There, we discuss the need for the inclusion of retail channel partners – especially for the emerging mobile markets.
Portfolio management for offering new services and service bundles quickly and efficiently will primarily benefit mobile operators that face these issues today. Such offerings are available from other ISVs, but now Amdocs offers them pre-integrated with its revenue management and customer management solutions.
In service and resource management, the ability to track and allocate not only network equipment, but also CPE and IT-like resources positions Amdocs and its CSP customers well in these new areas of business opportunity. The network planning capabilities, in general and specifically for mobile backhaul, strengthen Amdocs’ integrated lifecycle network design and roll-out capabilities and attempt to obviate the need for other add-on software programs for these functions.
Amdocs continues to enhance its service delivery capabilities: it expanded its SDP portfolio as a result of the recent acquisition of jNetX. Amdocs also announced a partnership with Mformation Technologies to provide a mobile device management solution. With this partnership, Amdocs can offer solutions in all the major SDP categories identified by Analysys Mason: telecoms application servers, mobile content management, real-time charging and mobile device management. Amdocs still has some work to do to integrate these offerings and expand its professional services support for SDP solutions, but it is well positioned to drive growth in this business.
The BSS implementation pack offers the promise of a quick implementation of a nearly full BSS/OSS stack (minus the fault and performance management functions) for new operators, or for operators starting a new subsidiary. One limitation of the suite is apparent: Amdocs has marketed its CES 8 system as a solution that focuses on the customer experience, but it does not offer any of the real-time or historical network service assurance functions that are critical to monitoring and assuring the customer experience of CSPs’ services. Providing such functions would require Amdocs to enter an entirely new line of business – something that might best be accomplished through acquisition.
The Amdocs CES 8 release is the next step in the increasingly sophisticated suite of SDP, BSS and OSS products that already support the majority of functions that a CSP needs to operate a modern communications concern. It handles large, very complex networks and provides robust support for sophisticated service bundles, both in the back office and increasingly the front office. As Amdocs continues to enhance its suite through customer requests, incorporated best current operations practices, and home-grown or acquired new technologies, it should continue to get better.