The migration from 4G to 5G is a boom for Amdocs, which handles back office and operational support services (BSS/OSS) for many top telecom companies, including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and UScellular. And while Amdocs has long been known as a billing system provider, the company says that its customers today rely on the company for much more than billing.
“Maybe 10 years ago we were just doing the billing. Now we are working with our customers on network optimization and next-generation OSS as well as the front-end of the business that focuses on customer experience,” said Anthony Goonetilleke, group president of technology and head of strategy for Amdocs.
During Amdocs’ fiscal Q4 quarterly update, the company reported revenues of $1.2 billion, an increase of 7.3% year on year. North America is the company’s biggest market and contributed $794 million to the company’s Q4 revenues.
Goonetilleke said that the company is working with telecom operators as they migrate to the cloud and helping them develop a hybrid strategy where some core systems are on premise and others are in the cloud. He said that operators find Amdocs’ expertise valuable because the company is agnostic and doesn’t compete with them or with the cloud providers. Instead, it can act as a “trusted partner” and provide its customers with expertise when it comes to their cloud migration.
During the company’s fiscal Q4, Amdocs highlighted its work with AT&T Mexico to migrate Amdocs systems from on-premises to the cloud to enable quicker adoption of 5G and develop new business models. In addition, Amdocs is implementing its artificial intelligence and data platform in the cloud for T-Mobile so the operator can get better insights into its business and improve customer experience. With Verizon, Amdocs is in the midst of deploying its cloud-native CatalogOne platform so the operator can quickly create and launch new 5G service offerings.
Amdocs also is involved in early proof of concept trials involving rating and charging for edge services. Goonetilleke said that it’s working with its customers to figure out how data at the edge should be monetized.
Although it’s still early in the development of edge services, Goonetilleke said that there are interesting use cases for edge computing currently being developed at operator 5G labs. Amdocs is involved in T-Mobile’s 5G Open Innovation Lab in Seattle and AT&T’s 5G Innovation Studio in Dallas.
Interestingly, Amdocs is seeing a lot of interest from the enterprise market, as companies look closely at private networks. “We can help the operator with our MarketOne platform that helps them sell different 5G packages and services to enterprises,” Goonetilleke said.
However, he warned that private networks aren’t a “one size fits all” type of product and different types of enterprises want different types of functionality. “The bigger guys want simplification,” he said. “But the SMBs, want functionality and security.”