Welcome to SCTE Tech Expo twenty twenty five. I'm Amy Sweezy. My next guests are from Amdocs. I have Iris Harel and Rob LaMenz. Thank you so much for being here. So, Iris, first of all, just tell me what do you do at Amdocs? What's your title and what's your job? So I'm the regional VP CBE, which is the customer business executive. I'm in charge of the meteor operators in the United States covering fiber and satellite as well. Okay. And Rob, what about you? So under a separate division at Amdocs under the mobile division, I am the vice president for all of North American fiber. So if it's a fiber company, either construction or operator, we sell and deliver fiber to those companies. Okay. Fantastic. Alright. Iris, I wanna start with you. Talk a little bit about fiber, obviously picking up quickly and strongly. What are some of the things that are driving the market that Amdocs is addressing? So first of all, thank you for the question. I think I wanna take a step back before and just explain that the way we see right now the fiber market, we are actually segmenting it into three different categories, and each one of them is actually leading to something different. So the first segment, if I would say, is the current existing service providers that are embarking now into their fiber journey, and they're independent. They are not being backed up by any private equity or anything like that. The second segment are the private equities that are getting into the market now. They are backing service providers. They are creating new startups, and they are actually buying other service providers and launching their own fiber business. And the third one, if you can see based on the news, is that the the tier zero, tier one telcos are in are getting into this market as well. You could see the AT and T Lumen. You see T Mobile and and Metronet or T Mobile and Lumos. You see Verizon and Frontier. So you see that movement in the market already happening. Having said that, each one of those segments have different needs and are looking for something a bit different. So if you look at the private equities, they're a stem from capital. They are looking to have, like, a small ecosystem that can be can be repeated and be serving more than one of the units that they're requiring. They are looking for something that would be cost effective. They're looking to monetize their ROI as soon as possible. So this is what they are looking for. This is what they are going to look for in terms of solutions and and platforms that they would need. We have the existing service providers that they already have an ecosystem. They already have a BSS and an OSS and workforce management and everything, but they need to augment their ecosystem with components. So they would look for specific services or specific products, etcetera, just to augment their ecosystem in order to make it suitable for fiber. Right. And the last portion is the tier zero, tier one operators like the carrier AT and T, T Mobile, Verizon. They would look for streamlining their business and to make it more consistent between the fiber and the and the the mobile services that they have and increase their footprint. We need to remember that at the end of the day, beyond just making everything profitable, it's also there is a big driver behind it with the bid program that the government launched. And, therefore, people would look to have a piece of the pie, and that's kind of what we see right now in terms of trend. I think that some of the things that you see right now in terms of merger and acquisition is only the tip of the iceberg of what you see that the private equities are coming and buying companies. I think it will just it will pick up and even be more extensive than it is right now. Okay. So what is it then that sets Amdocs apart? You're mentioning all these other companies. There's a lot of players out there. What is it that differentiates you from everybody else? So by definition, because there are so many different needs, we have to create something that would be good for multiple dimensions and multiple aspects. So the Fiber One, which is what we have, is if I would say the Elevator Peaches, it's empowering the fiber operators to go from build to value very fast. It's a platform that has products and services. It is TMF form based APIs, is very important to most of the operators. It has AI capabilities, machine learning capabilities. It has the ability to provide a BSS as a service, OSS as a service. It allows to have real time predictive analytics of the way you roll out the fiber, the way you get the value from it to make sure you address the market ahead of time. Like, if you know that there is a I'll give you an example. A great example for that is that if you are calling the call center and you wanna move to fiber because you heard this is a better technology, and the call center will tell you, no. It's not there yet in your area. I would hang up and look for somebody else. However, if your call center gets the information that this is coming in a week, the representative will tell you, it's a great question, Amy. Wait a week, we would be able to give you fiber in your area. This is how you maintain loyalty, and you make sure you know your customer, and you adhere things ahead of time. You're not waiting for the last minute Yeah. For things to happen. All those things are building our platform. So if I would summarize our key differentiators is software as a service, complementary services that are built from group of experts, flexibility, multitenancy, which is super super ex extremely important for the especially for the private equities because they will be looking for a multitenancy platform and solution. And above all, AI driven and empowering the business quickly to monetize it as soon as possible. Okay. Rob, I wanna chat with you a little bit about IQ Geo. You have a partnership with them. How does that work? So inside of Amdocs we specialize in building very strategic and important partnership for our operator customers. IQ Geo brings a really interesting technology where they do automated design, automated workforce management, workflow management, construction management. Basically they have a modular component system that allows an operator to do pretty much anything from end to end in a software perspective. Eros mentioned, we come from a software background. Amdoc's technology is software driven. We started as an IT shop and it moved into networks and telco. The partnership is very strategic in that IQGio sells a great software but implementation of that across operators and the complexity it takes to build a system like that inside of an operator takes a different skill set. And so we have that partnership that allows us to go in and bolt that software into existing systems, migrate data from one system to another, expand capabilities, customize feature sets that IQ Geo really by themselves doesn't have the necessary time to do. Other partnerships we work with Nvidia for stuff like digital twinning and mass data analytics. IQG is a great automated platform and they have some own AI systems as well but Amdoc's AI capabilities, our vision is to really set design into an automated space where datasets from an IQG or a municipality or utility, the way utilities run underground, our designs right now are based on visual inspections, localized efforts to make sure that the design can be placed properly. We wanna move that into the data analytics space. We'll make it faster, we'll make it cheaper, we'll make it more accurate and by bringing all that to the theater and doing mass analytics through a partnership like NVIDIA and IQGeo, we believe we have a time to market advantage that a lot of operators and a lot of construction companies that we subcontract to would take advantage of. So Rob, can you talk a little bit about fiber and how it compares to other technologies like satellite or fixed wireless? Sure. From Amdoc's perspective, the technology really is irrelevant. We're agnostic to the actual technology itself. Our product set from our OSS, our billing, our customer management systems, the way through construction management and execution in general, really doesn't matter what technology we're dealing with. Amdoc can handle any of that. The the industry itself is interesting though because you see a lot of movement in the fixed wireless and low earth orbit satellite space. And I and I'm not trying to say anything negative about one of those compared to fiber. It's just that they're spectrally limited. There is something that keeps them from growing. Fiber inherently just has more advantage because it's from a physics standpoint, it's more suitable for higher speeds, much lower latency, and it's standardized. You've got these new technologies which are great and they have a lot of nichey applications to them in the marketplace, but they're not gonna scale the way fiber does or the way broadband in general does. Know, here we are at SCT and it's mostly a cable environment. You know, lot of these companies are moving towards fiber and there's a reason they're doing that because in the long term of technology evolution, they go from laying glass on the ground to, oh, if you want to do a capacity upgrade, it's a WDM change out. It's it's a new mux or it's a new lambda wave from a light perspective. It's not do I deploy ten more football sized satellites in orbit or find ways to push fixed wireless from a tower into a dense urban environment. And those have great applications. They're they're wonderful technologies, but they're just not scalable like fiber is. So what we did is we set our our systems up so that we can handle any of those technologies. And as I mentioned, our billing is, you know, world class cloud native, very lightweight, compact for small operators. You wanna throw FWA out there? We can help you with that. You wanna throw fiber out there, bead funded? We can help you with that. All the way through to construction management, execution management. So we feel like we're really well positioned for any of those technologies in general. Alright. Iris, how excited are you to be here at SCTE Tech Expo twenty twenty five? It's always nice to come here. You meet everywhere. And the other thing that is right up our alley is it's fiber everywhere. Fiber everywhere. So again, we invite everyone to come to our booth and see our solutions. Alright, Rob, what about you? Excited to be back? This is my first time here actually. Haven't been to this conference before, so it's my first time in environment. A lot of good energy out here today, a lot of interesting boost. I'm looking forward to getting around and meeting everybody. Yeah. What's your What are you most looking forward to taking back with you? The little swag, know, the little stress balls or the, you know, I don't know. Right. And the best advice you can give to people since you've been here many times over, what would you say to Rob? Walk around, meet everyone. I actually wanna take with me some deals back. Okay. And I I always hear from people, make sure you wear comfortable shoes. Yes. You're walking around a lot. Alright. Iris Harrell, Rob LaMenz, thank you so much from Amdocs. We appreciate your time. Good for having us here. Alright. This is SCTE Tech Expo twenty twenty five. I'm Amy Sweezy.
