Media Room

Addressing the opening session of the Amdocs InTouch Business Forum 2011 in Miami, Gelman said that while he believed the future is bright for service providers, they will have to transform if they are to overcome the challenge of today’s exponential explosion of data.

This explosive data growth is not sustainable in the long term, Gelman told an audience of over 300 Amdocs customers, partners and industry analysts and media at the Eden Roc Renaissance Hotel in Miami Beach, as he pointed to the widening gap between revenue growth and data demand.

Facing up to this, Gelman continued, meant that service providers will have to transform their operations, but he acknowledged that transformation involved risk, which was why service providers needed a partner like Amdocs to help them on their journey.

In a presentation outlining Amdocs’ vision, Gelman said service providers face two major challenges: network-facing challenges and customer-facing challenges. In terms of the customer-facing challenges, the Amdocs CEO first noted how today’s customer has multiple personas the service provider needs to attend to: their home persona, at work or when traveling.

And aside from these multiple personas, customers also have multiple devices across which they consume an ever-increasing amount of services and they expect to receive all these services at all times and on all devices. Today’s customer, Gelman continued, also expects to be served equally well by their service provider at all touchpoints, be it the call center, retail store, dealer Web self service, or through social media.

This increasing complexity of the customer experience meanwhile is matched by the complexity of the service provider’s network-facing challenge. Not only does the service provider have keep up with the increasing volume of data, which entails running the network more efficiently, service providers also have to monetize this data.

“All-you-can-eat data plans do not make sense anymore,” Gelman told the audience, saying dynamic, personalized and value-based pricing would become key for service providers. The Amdocs CEO also said that machine-to-machine technology, which generates data, would also become an important element of service providers’ strategies to monetize their networks.

Expanding on Amdocs’ philosophy, Gelman noted that “customer experience is the focus of everything we do” and outlined the company’s evolution from introducing the concept of customer centricity to Yellow Pages, to integrated customer management in which billing and customer management were added together, to today’s customer experience systems, which include revenue management, customer management, order management and operating support systems.

The next step in Amdocs’ gradual evolution, Gelman announced, would be “customer experience to the power of x,” which would be a multiplication of all touchpoints, for any device or service, involving network monetization and all business- and operational-support system stacks.

To close the first day of the InTouch Business Forum, Amdocs president and head of the Product Business Group Rami Schwartz outlined the company’s roadmap. Aside from upgrading current products, Schwartz said there would be two major anchors to the next major version of the Amdocs portfolio, version 9 (version 8.1 is due to be generally available at the end of November): network monetization and customer experience to the power of x.

For network monetization, version 9 will focus on smart networks, including data monetization, network optimization and the closed-loop quality of experience. For customer experience to the power of x, the new version will concentrate on multi-touchpoints, social experience (expanding CRM into the social Web) and the context-driven, personalized customer experience.