CXO Forum 2023 Sponsor Series: In conversation with Sarit Assaf, Amdocs

Bridge Alliance’s flagship event, our CXO Forum, returned as an in-person event held in Singapore this year. Against the backdrop of the “Telco to Techco: Who Dares Wins” theme, our SVP of Alliance Partnership and New Business Ken spoke to some of our sponsors on how they can help telcos in their transformation journey to meet the new challenges posed by the 5G era and beyond.

In the first of our be in conversation sponsor series this year, Ken interviews Sarit Assaf, General Manager, New Tech, Amdocs.

 

Ken: Could you start off by telling us what Amdocs does in helping companies to transform their business?

Sarit: So Amdocs is a global company. We are celebrating 40 years in the telco business, having customers, telcos all around the globe.

And we are a product-led services company which helps telcos to monetise and to build a customer experience system for their users, for their customers. I am proud to say that we are the leading vendor in the market, having a proven record of productions, a live system all across the globe with the leading Telcos in the US and in Asia Pacific and in international regions.

So, very, very proud to be a part of Amdocs!

Ken: Great! So as a software vendor serving the telecom industry, what are the main trends that you’re seeing that’s happening in the telecom industry?

Sarit: Yeah. So we are at the conference where we hear a lot about digital experience and about 5G. And I think a few years ago, the big trend was about digital transformation. Telcos and operators wanted to improve the experience of their customers and they invested a lot of in digitising the system, automating the system, creating this superior customer experience, breaking the boundaries and the barrier for experience.

They build multichannel applications, customer 360, invested a lot in real time and having transparency to their customers. And today with metaverse and generative AI I believe the personalisation will be different in the future.

And I’m looking forward to better understand how metaverse and generative AI will change the personalisation landscape.

The second major, major mega trend that we see is 5G.

We see massive investment operators are investing billions in spectrum, rolling out radio and edge and cloud. Unfortunately, the industry didn’t, not yet, I think, found the killer application, what would be the revenue stream that would justify the huge ROI.

And lately, we see operators are slowing down a bit of investment in 5G. What we also obviously see is that due to those massive investment operators are looking for new ways to find new revenue streams. Obviously, the B to B market, the enterprise market was always a growth engine for the service providers. 5G enabled the operator to build 5G based solution for the enterprise ecosystem. And for that, we see we learn a lot about how Telcos are actually platformising themselves, are opening their network, are investing in APIs, investing in monetization engines, investing in ecosystem play, which is totally different from what we saw from telcos.

And that’s very inspiring and obviously they will continue investing in cloud infrastructure and cloud technologies in order to open up the system.

Ken: So, if I may ask, how will Amdocs help telcos in this transformation journey to become a techco?

Sarit: So I think Amdocs can help service providers to transform themselves.

As you said, techco is a transformation and we in Amdocs transformed ourselves seven years ago. We rebuilt our full portfolio and offering because we realize the platform play is just around the corner. So we actually rebuild all our portfolio and reskill all our manpower and employees in order to be ready for the future. So we build a ‘lego block’, modernised and modular portfolio, and I think this portfolio will be a key enabler for service providers.

We also have a very strong SI arm which is essential for operator because they are platformising themselves. It’s not only about technology. It’s a combination of technology and a DNA change , a culture change. They will need help, they will need partners to help them to modernize and to build this DNA change.

So from offering perspective, if I’m going back to technology, I believe we have from offering perspective the best catalog which enables an operator to launch new services rapidly to integrate with different catalogs because we are talking about openness and open systems and integrating with others. We have a groundbreaking experience system which spans from sales, to ordering, to monetization and to care.

And we’ll speak about later on about the Microsoft engagement that we have. We have launched freestyle billing which enables you to choose whatever monetisation approach you want to use whether it’s API or SLA or quality of service or to monetise your slice infrastructure.

And obviously the end to end orchestration and the fulfillment and the activation. So we have a very vast portfolio from the digital to the BSS to the network. And lately we launched the marketplace which is a B-to-B marketplace with partners and solutions and also with the playground that help service providers actually to build the new services rapidly.

Ken: Very good. Perhaps you are able to share some interesting projects that Amdocs has, that involve a Telco.

Sarit: OK. That’s exciting because as I said, we are a global company and lately we launched for the leading vendor in the USA, a digital BSS system which is cloud-based, SaaS-based. This vendor, his mission was to break and to have the best customer experience for his customer. He launched the first fixed wireless access line of business. Talking about hassle free, so experience needs to be simple and transparent to the user and our product, actually the digital and the catalog and the freestyle billing and the OSS enable this operator to do so.

We also helped T-Mobile, the second very large operator also in the US to modernize and to build the cloud based system. T-Mobile has a vision of consolidation. They want to consolidate everything. So our system and our product enables them to consolidate all lines of business and the experiences to one system, and then later on to flexibly develop new innovation on top of this offering.

Ken: So one last question. What is the value that Amdocs brings to the table to the market with your new B-to-B offering? And how can that help telcos?

Sarit: So apart from the 40 years’ experience that we bring to the table, in the past years we are focusing on building a robust B-to-B offering because we understood that the potential in 5G is in the B-to-B in the enterprises area.

So we have a holistic approach to B-to-B.

We are dealing; our offering spans from sales to ordering to fulfillment to monetisation, to care and also to the network and to the marketplace that we have and, we lately engaged with Microsoft. So in MWC, we announced our Microsoft engagement and I’m very excited about that because Microsoft is a platform play. It is a platform vendor and that help us to create this platform play game or journey that the service providers are looking for.

That helps us also to embed the generative AI in the offering. We have a cool demo when you can see the collaborative tools that are embedded natively in our B-to-B offering. And that, you know, that’s a different experience. In the past, we are focusing and the whole industry was focusing on having superior experience for the B-to-C market. Our offering today is focused on the B-to-B, building the superior experience for B-to-B and helping the operators to build this one stop shop for the B-to-B market.

Ken: Great. So thank you so much Sarit for joining me in today’s interview.

Sarit: Thank you very much for the opportunity.