Launching your own MVNO: Navigating the new world of telecom monetization

It's MWC twenty twenty four. We're back. The great indoors. It's day two. It's busy, and I'm delighted to welcome, two guests to this episode. Although one of the guests will almost be co hosting with me. So mister Anton Alpino, Head of Operations Simplified AWS and Galit Dan from Amdoc. So Galit, you head up our digital brands business unit, correct? Exactly. Okay, so welcome both of you. And before we dive into things, Anton, let's start with you. Give us a bit of your history and the role that you have currently at AWS. Sure. Well, I'm an industry veteran in a way, which makes me feel sad because I'm an old guy. I've been working in the telco industry since ninety eight. So more than twenty five years, most of my career has been in ESS and SS systems, dealing with this stuff. And I joined AWS four years ago. And when I joined AWS, telco was kind of a known thing. And I was one of the lucky guys who had to start the telco business for AWS. And I because of my background in BSS and SS, I naturally fit into leading the go to market activities for these type of solutions. And that's what I'm still doing now globally, essentially, for all telco operators out there. Because AWS, we don't really build software, these type of applications. It's essentially a big partnership. Excellent. And Galit, for our listeners, give a little intro. I know you of course, and everybody at Amdocs knows you, but for the greater world, maybe give a quick history of yourself and the role that you do with us here at Amdocs. Yeah, sure. Happy to be here. I'm also like you and since nineteen ninety eight, need you to be a little bit closer to the microphone. If you can. So if you talk now into the Now it's better? That's much better. So I'll ask the question again. I wasn't believing I was deaf. You were gonna say turn my mic Which might be the case given you. So Galit, we know you of course at Amdocs and but for our listeners, give a bit of a history and a description of the role that you do here at Amdocs. Yes, sure. So I am also a veteran in this telecommunication industry like Anton since ninety eight. I'm a technology lady started as a developer, many years of experience in the industry, in the telecommunication industry and the recent few years, very busy of generating the technology and the platform for the SAS. What we call a BSS in a box business. And our partner AWS doing some great magic recently together with us. Very exciting. Okay, excellent, excellent. So great to have you here. So we're going to talk about digital brands. And I'm going to ask you this question first, Khalid. What is a digital brand? Well, first it's about brands which are digital, which means the sub brands or the B brands of the MNOs as well as the MVNOs and MVNEs. Actually it's the wholesale business. Those who are looking to launch very quick and fast on board a new brand, digital brand, being able to scale it up with a full alignment of their investment and the actual business growth. That's in a nutshell what this is all about. Okay. That's great. Tell me, ask Anton, I'll ask you this question and then Khalid, you answer also, but talk about the partnership that AWS and Amdocs have right now for building out new digital brands. What's all behind this? Well, the partnership with Amdocs is not yesterday. So we started partnering four years ago and these old telco things started in AWS. And Amdocs was essentially the first one we we wanted to partner with because of the historical background, the success in the industry. So we actually wanted to learn from them how to do proper stuff for telco players. And this partnership has been evolving in the last four years in multiple direction. And the the the digital brands with this is actually one of the latest born from from this great partnership we've been having. Capturing what is a trend now in the industry of doing things differently. Right? And the digital transformation per se is not really a new topic, but has never been really delivered in full because of lack of technology or complexity in the organizations or business model, which were not there. But now with SaaS becoming more and more prominent, it's actually removing some of those barriers. And we have found in in with Amdocs, a perfect alignment in vision on how to build these things using modern technologies, which are based on cloud native implementation principles, which actually exactly fulfills the requirements for a digital brand, which is needs to scale fast, needs to be deployed in minutes, and needs to provide a full end to end digital experience. So all the interactions are actually happening through one non human assistant type of channels because that's what people is used to today dealing with digital navy business like Airbnb or Uber or Amazon itself. So we want to provide the same type of experience also in the telemedicine. Okay. Excellent. And Galeet, is there anything you'd like to add to that? Yeah. So it's very clear, like the transformation about has to be on cloud. Right? And when we say cloud, it's about native platform, cloud native to be developed. And it had the digital brand. Actually, we just recently named it ConnectX. The ConnectX platform is serverless platform. And we have this approach where like we split the entire paradigm into three. We want our customer to focus on sale and marketing and the business. We are focusing together with AWS on technology. So we need to make them free up from the need to have in place an infrastructure, right? Actually in the SAS business, they buy a service. And with a serverless cloud native, it's actually, it's an open API platform. The sky's the limit from technology perspective. So this setup that we have created with AWS is a perfect match to free up our customers, to be focused only on business and to leave us the technology entirely from product through the infrastructure up to the operation. It's all encapsulated in this price per unit or price per sub. And this is a perfect fit, especially for the MVNO and for the MVNE businesses who are really have their own segment and are very busy to create their voice and personalization to bringing those subscribers and everything related to technology. They don't want to be on top of that and they need to be able to move fast. Right? And fast time to market and fast onboarding is the key is an essential and that's what it is. No, I think that's so I'll paraphrase. You're gonna take care of all the difficult technology stuff and let the entrepreneurs, marketeers, business people launch a brand basically. I know that this partnership is already, obviously it's active for some time. Can you point to some examples of customers that we jointly have Amdocs and AWS in this domain? That's for you, Anton, sorry. That's okay. Well, when we want to talk about customer, I think the biggest example, this has been one of the first lighthouse customers for both companies has been T Mobile and United States. There we are running a large cloudification of their BSS together, really bringing the legacy to the new world of the cloud native implementation. And that's delivering a lot of benefits in terms of agility, TCO improvements, elasticity of the infrastructure, as well as freeing T Mobile time to actually deliver and create new product and offering in line of what we're trying to do with DBS as well. That's one essential part of the cloud way of doing stuff. We know by a fact that normally companies or enterprise, they invest eighty percent of their time on running existing business, and they have only twenty percent of time to invest in innovations and create new product and try to capture new market. In the cloud, this proportion is actually flipped. So we want them to invest maximum twenty percent of time in running the business. Eighty percent of time, they should invest in creating and capturing the business. And that's the part that we use, we are using actually T Mobile US, and we want to use in DBS, and in many others implementations, right, that we have so many customers together. Vodafone Germany is another one. I mean, it's just a big number all over the place. Astra in Malaysia, like amazing things we're doing there. Globe in the Philippines. It's all over the place, and it's actually a way which keep growing and growing every year because the customer, they see the van. They see that actually, yes, they can really put their effort in building new business and and create innovation for they and customers. And just let us do the Do the hard work. Heavy lifting. Yeah. That's it. That's fine. And that's what we want because we will be as much as successful as our customer will. Ankali, can you point to a digital brand that AWS and Amdocs have enabled collectively? Yeah. We have actually multiple examples. I will choose two. Yeah. One is the greenfield and the other one is brownfield. So we have in South Africa, the Mellon mobile. Yeah. Started as a greenfield. Actually, we pretty much fast. We're successfully integrating to the relevant network and going live. I think it was a record time and, we have a very successful engagement there like the request for the features and richness of the products keep coming. Yeah. And, we, as I said, we want our customers to focus on business. We will focus on technology and we trust everything related to infrastructure, the AWS. So we are leveraging almost like everything needed, any service that AWS can provide us. And that's what we are actually the approach that we take. And it works very well because we are introducing in a very agile way, very frequently, almost daily based new things and features. And the other example is, more of a brownfield customer that we just recently engaged with, in Spain, actually here in Spain. Oh, wow. Yeah. The fee network, which is also very cool, engagement, which is over there. It's like a multiplayer. It's about fiber and TV and mobile. And like, well, very excited about the richness of capabilities that we need to deliver to fee. And again, these guys, they are very busy on their business, how to make money. While we are busy on technology and the engagement that we have with AWS, for them, it's seamless. Yeah. Leave the technology to us, focus on business. Tell us what you need. And we will continue to evolve and productize and make the features very rich every need that you will come up with. It's really, really cool. So let's put that to the test. This was going to be the fun part of the podcast because when we first met last week, you got me thinking Anton Uncley. And I started thinking about creating my own MVNO brand in Canada. Really? And I'm a marketeer, as you know. So I figured out the brand. I figured out the segmentation. I figured out my value proposition. I basically want to start an MVNO that goes after hockey fans in Canada. Oh. Now, it's a big market, everybody loves hockey in Canada. But particularly, I want to go after the market of sixteen year old to thirty eight. So a fairly young demographic. I've done a deal with the NHL as far as content and commercialization. And that's as far as I've gone. That's what I've done right now. So how can you help me? Have you got your investors already? Got the investors all lined up. It's all Oh, wow. My wife's family are very generous. They're gonna help me Congratulations. So where do we begin and what are the steps to make this dream of mine a reality? Okay. So while you're focused on identifying your target audience, this sixteen young hockey savvy, okay? Yeah. And brainstorming and thinking what exactly your offering should look like, we will engage and we will establish immediately your brand, a tenant for you. Like in a matter of minutes, you will have a very first version. We'll give you the name, Then we will start to generate with you a potential offering, an AI based offering suggestion, not necessarily the ones that you will launch, but we will have a very, you know, not a white page start. And having that in your hand, you will be able to start trial and test it and then configure and see how the system works, how easy it is to configure your offering. We will also start to collect all the information related to the ecosystem integration to get ready for you to start. Then we'll see what is your tipping point where you wanna launch? What is the event, the business And accordingly, will bid together a plan. And together, you know, with a small team, I have to say, on your side, definitely, from our side as well, this engagement will evolve on a daily and on a weekly base. And all of a sudden, two, three months after you might find yourself selling to this younger sixteen teenage. Yeah. Cool offering with your own specific personalized voice. This is very cool. So you'd help me with the marketing as well there. Know if you said what event you could launch this at, what name. There's a marketing component as part of this whole service as well. Yeah, definitely. MDocs have the ability to host and to work with you to build the actual experience. We have the relevant team doing so. So we are going actually to be your partner to help, your success is ours. So we will team up any needs related to technology. The AWS team are there for us. It's like goes without say. Yeah. So it's for you, it's seamless. Just let us know what you need. Focus on your business. Yeah. And let's make it up. Wow. And and how does AWS get involved then? Well, first and foremost, I'm a little bit sad because you are not targeting by age. Okay. I'm sorry. I'm I'm not I'm talking to I'm not talking to my age either, by the way, just to let you know. Well, a Galit You like hockey. No, but I would like to be sixteen years Jokes jokes apart, as Galit was saying. Right? That's a little bit secret sauce of SaaS and and and cloud deployments and the amazing technology. We want to make sure you can try and experiment. That's where the innovation comes from. Have an idea, but if you don't try it, you don't know if it's gonna work. So other than giving all the tools and the gears for you go and get it, we want to also make sure that you can experiment in a controlled and affordable. That's why serverless is super important. Because you don't really need to pre provision any capacity or do any specific investments. You just go in the marketplace. You buy the DBS. You do the basic setups with the support of Amdocs. And then you try your campaign because that's the only way you know if for you to know if it's gonna be successful or not. And the easier we can make this process for you, the more chance you will have to try, the more chance you will have to be the next viewer in the cloud. And that's pretty much it. And that's why we work with DAMNOX to enable all this magic happen. That's the real magic. And because we can't really invent the business for you. But we can invent the methodology for you to invent. And that's what we're focused And will you stay with me beyond just the initial launch and setup? Are you with me as a partner now in this journey as we take it forward? Absolutely. We have our customer success that are engaged from the very first minute, even before you sign a contract with us. Yeah. Then when you go live, we walk together with you ongoing link to make sure that it's works well, that you're doing money. Life's things needs to be changed, to be updated, to be added. The first one to know is our customer success. So your success is ours. Yeah. And we do everything that you will leverage well, everything that we can offer on one hand. On the other hand, you are actually successful. Yeah. It's very it's like your your win is ours. It's a win win. It's a triple win actually. Yeah. Engagement. Well, that's good to know. That's good to know indeed. Because who knows how this idea is gonna pan out. I'm gonna need some extra advice. And you mentioned it before, Galit, but how does generative AI now play into this model that we're talking about? Again, I'm here at the show. I'm pitching my ideas to people. I see generative AI everywhere. I see generative AI on the Amdocs booth. I see everybody talking about it. Where does that help me and how does that supercharge me even further? So I mentioned the fact that when you're establishing a new tenant with us, immediately, we have this AI that's introduced you some options. As I, and as I said, it's not necessarily the ones that we walk for you, but this is a start. You know, we have this notion of just do just start. Yeah. Then and to mention experiment, see if that works for you and then doesn't, you know, make money fine. So let's refine, let's see what works better. And all those things really recommendation, with all the automation behind the scenes comes with this generative AI. So generative eyes is embedded seamlessly, but definitely help you to kickstart and actually ongoingly, to introduce more options, for you either to choose or to trial or even not to do anything with. But the whole idea is like, it's an enabler for you and you will help us to shape up your version of it. Yeah. That's good to know. So that's it. So I'm going to launch this business, deal done. Let's get started. Oh, exciting. I know. Where can I buy it? At the Toronto Maple Leafs stadium is where we do a lot of the marketing is what I'm thinking about. But thank you, that's a great fun example to help illustrate for our listeners this incredible partnership. And I think going back to the show that we're in now, Anton, we're only in day two. Is there anything you've seen so far that has been really significant for you? Anything really profound? Well, I mean, Mobile World Congress is always a place you find a lot of innovation and there are multiple items. Of course, this year is, I would say, not really a hundred percent, but ninety nine percent all about Gen AI. And more or less everywhere you can see how people is experimenting this technology and how they find value out of it. The things that actually amaze me the most is that you have immediate feelings about the potential of this. Yeah. You see an outcome basically in few minutes, right? Simple things like having a more responsive chatbot is very easy to think. Or having, as Gillette was saying, how comes a world where I actually need to launch a new product and I can just ask the Gen AI to create a prototype for me with all the related marketing materials, communications, and pricing schemas and whatnot. Yeah. In the thirty second, you really understand the impact of this. These are processes that normally takes three, six months, if not more. Yeah. You can do this in thirty seconds and in a proper SaaS environments, you can experiment this in another thirty seconds. And after two minutes, you're going to know if you're going to be a rich man or not. Yeah. And this is simply crazy. Yeah. Mind blowing. Yeah. And what about you, Glee? What have you seen so far at the show? So, you know, it will sound maybe to say the obvious. Yes. It's about this. Everything is generative AI has to be embedded in everything that are actually being done. Everybody are looking to make complexity to make it simple. Right? I think a key element this year is, you know, we have this notion of just do. Yeah. We really encourage, you know, technology is these days is enabling a lot more comparing like even to last year. And then everything happening with AI, it's going to blow up. So I think just do. Yeah. No, that's Now this is a question I'm gonna throw in for my own sort of personal market analysis. And in every guess that we've had on this year so far, we talk about generative AI at the show, what it's going to do for telecommunications, what it's going to do for our customers, etcetera. But Anton, I'm going to ask this question. What does it do for you as an individual? Where do you use generative AI, whether it's ChatGPT? No, sorry, AWS bedrock, of course. Same. Where in your everyday life do you use it now? And the reason I'm asking this question is because every single answer I get is very, very different. And it's very interesting. I will have to spoil myself a little bit. Of the first thing I actually started doing by leveraging AI being a chat, TTP or whatever else, has been actually doing the hard work for pulling in me notes and narratives. Because that's I'm not really a great writer myself. Right? Right. I really wanted to leverage that and give it a try. I have to say, brings amazing results. That saved me fifty percent of my time when trying to pull my notes and get some content out there. It's just crazy. I mean, saves me a lot of time. Can do much more things like that. And that's one basic thing. Don't know how many people actually do that, but if you are not doing it, give it a try. Should try it. That sounds good. That sounds a good use case. Khalid, where have you used it in your everyday It's not that different actually. We know that there is no replacement for the human touch, but to be inspired, like when you're searching for a specific text or notes or whatever, like even when sometimes we are a bit lazy, we used to use it and then be, you can be inspired and then ideas would come. So it's really all over when it comes to text, when it comes to, you know, information that you need. Yeah. Absolutely. You know, it's like your new friend. Yeah. We see the results we have. We also responses. Like it. I don't like it. Come on, get improved. Yeah. It's a new personality in our life. Right? Yeah. So my approach is enjoy it. Yeah. Leveraging it and like make the best out of it because it's amazing progress. And yes, generative AI is here now and has to be, in Amdocs we have all the know how of this industry and who is better than us to create the telecommunication version of it? So it's exciting days, Indeed. Indeed. Now we're almost out of time, but we finish with our TGI to go quick fire round. And what I'm gonna do for both of you is give you a multiple choice question and you give me the answer based on your preference. And basically the idea of this is just to have a bit of fun to close things out, let our listeners learn a little bit more about you. So we shall you know, it is a fun thing to do. It's a nice way and I think we've had a great conversation. So I'm going to start with ukulele. You're going go for dinner tonight. Would you have tapas or would you have Chinese food? Definitely tapas. Hello, we're here in Barcelona. And Tom, what about you? Tapas, yes. And the reason that question's in there is that by the end of the week, you'd have had a lot of tapas, right? I think so that, know. Next question. You could go on vacation At the end of this show, after a successful show, would you go to Thailand or Ibiza? That one's for you, Anton. Sorry. Well, despite I would be tempted to go to Thailand, I would go to Ibiza simply because it's closer. And you don't have to do another flight, basically. A big long flight. You can take a boat and go there. Gillette? I'm going to Kilimanjaro, my friend. Alright, wow. Well, tell us a little bit about that. And when's that happening? Actually next week. Oh, really? Beware of the lions. So my mind is all over there. Don't ask me about Thailand or any other So that sounds incredible. And you're going next week to climb Kilimanjaro. Yeah, I am. And have you completed a feat similar to this before? We will see next week. Yeah. And you've been training? Are you ready to? What do you think? Well, hope so. I wanna just say it's been a pleasure to know you now. Will always remember you. Definitely. Well, sounds that sounds incredible. So best of luck with that. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Anton, do you like football? I mean, you're you're Italian. Football or basketball? You would be surprised. I like more basketball. Ah, okay. Definitely less. I'm surprised. Yeah. Yeah. That's because I'm a short guy. I don't like to see all these tall people. No, honestly. My hometown is back in Italy, back in the days, basketball was kind of the prime sport for some weird reasons. Yeah. Maybe because we were not really good in soccer and so we used a different sport to show off. Right? And it comes from there. Wow. Excellent. Excellent. Khalid, same question. Football. Why? I have a son who was a soccer player. Excellent. My world was for a few years all over it. Definitely. Alright. Is there a team that you admire or follow? It's mainly my son's admiration I'm following. So it was all here. Yeah. The Barcelona, the UK, he has some. Oh, excellent. Cool. Don't remember even. Well, there we go. Listen, we're out of time. I really enjoyed our conversation. I think we learned a lot about the partnership between Amdocs and AWS enabling my own digital brand and my own MVNO. Getting your insights on what you see here at the show and the impact of generative AI. So I'd like to thank both of you, Galit and Anton, for joining the show today. I hope you have a fantastic week. And Galit, best of luck again with the climb up Kilimanjaro, it sounds incredible. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.