The 5 secrets to our success in bringing the Amdocs Digital Brand Suite to life
The 5 secrets to our success in bringing the Amdocs Digital Brand Suite to life
How we're helping B-brands, MVNOs and others launch and operate digital brands without the hassle and cost of a multiyear digital transformation project.
My journey with Amdocs started over 20 years ago. From championing delivery for our strategic account to leading global competency centers, I’ve had the privilege and the pleasure to work with the best of the best in our industry – both within Amdocs and at our customer organizations.
I left my Amdocs home for a few years after being presented with new types of compelling professional opportunities and came back two and half years ago for an even more compelling opportunity – to head up the unit responsible for the mid and lower operator market segments and as part of it leading the Amdocs Digital Brand Suite product.
Digital for everyone?
When I came back, I took a deep and wide look at the Amdocs BSS offering and thought that we need to address better the lower tier operators.
There is a plethora of players – whether in telco, finance, utilities, or other, who also need to manage and monetize the customer lifecycle, who want to offer innovative services on digital channels, and who want to leverage AI to drive growth.
Bottom line, there are so many B-brand, MVNOs and other organizations around the world who want and need to launch and operate digital brands without all the effort and cost of a multiyear digital transformation project.
Getting SaaSy with it
What I realized is that addressing their needs meant taking our BSS assets and adapting them to a different type of customer profile, and to come to these customers with a new business model.
So, in 2021, we took the Amdocs portfolio and repackaged all the relevant BSS solutions for the cloud. We knew that the only way to support these players and their need to offer digital experiences with ease, simplicity, and cost efficiency, is with a SaaS-based offering.
After six months of hard work, we had rescaled the existing Amdocs BSS architecture for the cloud and had created our minimum viable product (MVP) for validating customer needs.
Coming up to speed
Though, this was no easy task. At the time, our team wasn’t comprised of cloud experts. They never needed to be. But now all this had changed. The team had to gain the requisite domain expertise in cloud computing as well as in AWS specifically, as this was the platform, we selected to power our new SaaS offering.
But even before all that, we had to first make sure we had everyone’s buy-in. When bringing change, if you don’t communicate, engage, and inspire, your chances of succeeding are not going to be very high.
So, we went ahead and communicated, engaged, inspired . . . and trained. By June the entire team was on board, excited about this transition, and giving it their all. And, we had over 100 cloud and AWS experts on our team.
At this point, we were also done with putting all the finishing touches on our new SaaS pricing model. We completed the content creation and design for all our marketing materials. All our people had been upskilled. We were ready to go.
Facing a hard truth
But three months after the June 2021 launch, it became clear to us that the solution architecture we created from the existing portfolio wasn’t the right fit for the SaaS model nor for our target customers.
We had taken BSS assets that were designed for a large-scale customer base and came with many complex features that weren’t needed by our new target user. The hard realization was that there was a fundamental issue with architecture.
So, what did we do?
My CTO, Roey Ben-Amotz and I sat down with the unit’s leadership team and came to the painful but necessary conclusion that while the way we did things was right, our solution was neither right for our customers nor for theirs.
What we had to do now was to start from scratch.
"Now that we had our product right, we knew that in parallel, we needed to revisit the business model, how we market, and how we sell."
A big win with a small step
We now needed a whole new portfolio of BSS assets for our customers.
But before we’d go off and write new products from scratch, we wanted to test the waters. So, we did a drill we called The 28, which, in effect, is a 28-day experiment.
We identified one part of the portfolio and set out to see if we could create it within 28 days. If we could see that it’s doable, then that would be the sign that we can and should keep going.
We created a commando team of developers, who started the work, and, as you guessed, after 28 days they came back with great success! They created exactly what we needed with completely new technology and got it working perfectly in the cloud.
We had the confidence to move on, and took an additional 28 days for more development, and another 28 days, and another. And in just a few months later, we created a whole new BSS offering with all the functionality B-brand, MVNOs and other organizations need for setting up and running a digital brand fast, easy, efficiently, and at any scale.
The great pivot
Now that we had our product right, we knew that in parallel, we needed to revisit the business model, how we market, and how we sell. So, we put together a new sales team with a whole new set of cloud-centric skills, established a new customer success function, and realigned our entire operations.
All this has brought us to where we are today – with our first customers running the Amdocs Digital Brand Suite, with a healthy pipeline in place, and with great feedback from the market.
We have just started this journey, but we know that it’s going to be great. With just the right cloud-based platform for businesses who want to provide their customers with a true digital experience, we couldn’t be better positioned to succeed.
The 5 secrets
The motivation, collaboration, and sense of achievement that we all experienced throughout this journey were profound.
And none of it could have been possible had we not taken the following strategic actions, in other words – here are the five secrets to our success in bringing the Amdocs Digital Brand Suite to life:
Be decisive – you can analyze the pros and cons of a decision forever, but – ultimately – you will need to make that decision before it’s too late and you miss the train of opportunity. Do it wisely, do your homework, and do it with confidence.
Get the team’s buy-in – don’t underestimate the importance of communicating the vision to the entire team, and making sure that everyone knows in which direction we’re heading and why, and that they’re all on board.
Generate short-term wins – going all in with an all-or-nothing approach could very well lead you to nothing. But when you set up short-term, achievable wins along the way, and when you stop to celebrate these wins, you are much better positioned to make progress and achieve your goals.
Fail fast – six months into our journey, we realized that the architecture that we thought was our winning ticket, in fact wasn’t. We acknowledged this quickly, and made that all important pivot without complaining, without blaming, and without crying over spilled milk. Instead, we acknowledged, learned, and moved on. Fast.
Never give up – all great things in life require effort. So, even when it gets challenging, and even when it feels overwhelming, you need to keep pushing. And never give up.
In conclusion
I am proud of our offering, of the team that made it happen, and of how we got to where we are today.
But where we’re at is only just the beginning. And I can’t wait to see all the great things that await us just around the corner and beyond.
