Considered as one of the telecom industry's most prestigious awards programs, Light Reading’s prestigious Leading Lights Awards (now in their 17th year) recognize the industry's top companies for their outstanding achievements in next-generation communications technology, applications, services, strategies, and innovation – and this year they named Amdocs as a winner in two categories.

1. Outstanding Digital Enablement Vendor Award

Light Reading gives this award to the next-generation OSS/BSS/CX, analytics or digital commerce systems vendor that stands out from its competitors, innovates constantly, helps set the industry trends, makes investors proud and makes employees happy.

This is actually the  second consecutive year that Light Reading has recognized Amdocs’ many industry-leading achievements with this award, including:

Despite the pandemic, we actually grew!

• Achieving record annual revenue, and year-on year growth
• Continued to develop/introduce innovative solutions,
• Successfully remotely delivered major project milestones worldwide,
• Operated customers’ mission-critical systems without interruption!

A clear strategic focus on cloud and 5G monetization, including:

• Five acquisitions in the last year, which included Openet and Sourced Group.
• We launched CES21 (our 5G-native, cloud-native, microservices-based, open, modular BSS-OSS integrated suite with:  A low/no-code experience technology platform/foundation (Experience360), and AI/machine learning productized analytics-capabilities across the entire portfolio, from 5G network functions, to service-automation and monetization, and care and commerce. 
• Along with T-Mobile and Microsoft, we are a founding partner of the 5G Open Innovation Lab which identifies/develops/deploys new use cases at scale, from agriculture to automobiles;
• We introduced a new industry-concept 5G value plane supported by our integrated set of 5G charging/policy functions, managed by a central catalog, enabling operators to drive 5G service-offerings and new business-models (B2B2X/NaaS/PENs/IoT) combined with a network-data-analytics function and network-exposure-function;
• We expanded multi-year strategic cloud agreements.

Recognized sustainability leadership, including Listed on Dow Jones Sustainability Index for the second consecutive year; a Carbon Disclosure Project Leader; and receiving  a GOLD Rating standard (EcoVadis)

A nurturing workplace environment, including a hybrid workplace model already in place before Covid; extensive diversity & inclusion programs; and extensive pandemic support for employees, their families and the communities in which we live and work.

2. Most Innovative Hybrid Networking Strategy Award

Awarded to the company that has outlined and clearly communicated an innovative, market-leading hybrid networking technology strategy during the past year, Light Reading named us as the winner for our pioneering converged unified platform for hybrid networks – Amdocs End-to-End Service & Network Orchestration solution – which answers the needs of today’s and tomorrow's hybrid networks.

“Amdocs has leveraged its experience in OSS and NFV orchestration to create a solution that meets the growing demands of service providers for digital operations, telco cloud management, 5G slicing, end-to-end service orchestration and more,” notes OMDIA Principal Analyst Stephanie Gibbons.

Amdocs End-to-End Service & Network Orchestration solution is packed full of innovation including:

• Hybrid network inventory supporting management and visualization of physical/logical/cloud/ virtual network functions across all network/cloud domains. 
• Low-code design environment used for onboarding PNFs/VNFs/CNFs using standard structures and information models, and which enables non-technical users to create models for defining and instantiating services, resources and products for hybrid service-decomposition.
• Vendor-agnostic, non-proprietary, open-source and standards-based solution, using open standard-based APIs (TM Forum, ETSI, 3GPP, ONAP, MEF).
• DevOps methodologies/toolsets drive continuous enhancements into deployed solutions.
• Intelligent closed-loop automation, enabled by machine learning, allow operators to detect and resolve service-performance degradations before they impact the customer experience, guaranteeing superior, end-to-end QoE, while increasing operations efficiency across complex hybrid infrastructure and multi-vendor technologies.
• Modular, cloud native, microservices-based architecture with multi-cloud deployment capabilities

This year, Light Reading selected Amdocs as a finalist in all six categories that we entered:

• Best Deal Maker – five acquisitions, including Openet and Sourced Group.
• Best New Open RAN Product (Amdocs SmartRAN) 
• Most Innovative Hybrid Networking Strategy (Amdocs End-to-End Service & Network Orchestration)
• Company of The Year (Public)  
• Outstanding Digital Enablement Vendor
• Best New 5G Core Product (5G Value Plane)  

Amdocs previous Light Reading Leading Lights wins include Outstanding Digital Enablement Vendor (2020), Most Innovative 5G Strategy (2019), Company of the Year (2018), Best Deal Maker (2017), and Most Outstanding Communications Technology vision (2017).