Dan Bieler, Katyayan Gupta, Clement Teo

We recently attended Amdocs' customer event in Singapore. Amdocs is gradually adjusting its strategy to reflect one of the most fundamental changes in the ICT industry today: Increasingly, business line managers, think the marketing or sales officer, are the ones influencing sourcing decisions. Traditional decision-makers, CTOs and CIOs, are no longer the sole ICT decision-makers. Amdocs is addressing this shift by:

  • Strengthening its customer experience portfolio.Successful telcos will try to regain lost relevance through improved customer experience. Marketing, portfolio product development, and sales are therefore growing in importance for telcos. Amdocs’ integrated customer experience offering, CES 9, provides telcos with a multichannel experience; proactive care; and self-service tools.
  • Betting big on big data/analytics.Amdocs is leveraging big data/analytics to provide real-time, predictive, and prescriptive insights to telcos about their customers’ behaviour. Communications-industry-specific converged charging and billing solutions as well as other catalogue solutions give Amdocs the opportunity to provide more value to telcos than some of the other players.
  • Selectively broadening its target customer base towards end users.Through its Digital Services division, Amdocs is considering packaging its tools as full B2B2C solutions to cater to the broader carrier-to-business-to-consumer value-chain. This way, Amdocs could serve sectors like retail, healthcare, media, or automotive that are fast recognising the significant value that technology can bring them for more interactive and real-time customer engagement. For instance, SingTel provided an interesting disruptive example of convergent “personalised TV.” This service combines a multiscreen, multiplatform, and personalized social user experience, made more predictive and intelligent with data analytics.

Amdoc’s strategy adjustment is not without risk. First, it does not have experience and the sales force to address business-line managers and end user customers. Second, the company risks entering into conflicts of interest with its main telco customer base as both parties target similar offerings. Third, unlike vendors like Cisco, Amdocs must continue to focus on its core telco business while diversifying itself in search of new revenue streams. All three issues can be overcome through the dedicated commitment of new resources to Digital Services and a transparent go-to-market partnership approach with telcos.

In its current position, Amdocs’ fortunes are tied to the speed of innovation by telcos. And this is lagging behind the speed of innovation in other sectors. To evolve further, Amdocs should position its strategic shift to carriers as building the most flexible “value-chain platform” together with them.