How does Amdocs “Make It Amazing?” Gil Rosen, CMO, Amdocs, answered this question and several others in an exclusive interview with Telecom Review on the sidelines of GITEX 2022.
Can you introduce Amdocs and give us a sense of the company’s size and customer base?
Amdocs is the global leader in telecommunication and media software. Our product suite and services power the world's largest telecom companies and media companies in the world, from T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon in the Americas, all the way through to Vodafone in Europe and Central Asia. We have 31,000 employees based across 80 countries. Our product suite allows our customers to run a telecom and media company, from managing the network deployment, 5G and Edge networks, all the way to the monetization side, through to the experience, and managing and operating a telecom company. We also provide services in the operational space.
We're the world leader. We've been in the business for 40 years, and we intend to preserve our leadership for a long time.
“Make it Amazing” seems to be an idea that underpins everything Amdocs does. What does the tagline mean to you and how do the words influence and shape Amdocs’ strategy and priorities?
Our manifesto says, “Behind the experiences that make the world say wow, you find us helping those who shape the future to make it amazing.” We believe that the software and services that we provide enable the world's largest telecom companies to operate and provide unlimited connectivity to their customers, whether enterprise customers or consumers. This connectivity enables endless experiences for their customers.
In the last few years, especially after the pandemic, we realized that connectivity is really the oxygen of modern society. Our software and operational services enable the world to tick, and we work on that very hard to ensure that our products and services allow our customers to launch amazing services to their customers.
The Gulf region is a key growth market for Amdocs. Can you tell us why that excites you and kindly elaborate on why the region is of such strategic importance?
We've been in the business for a long time – 40 years precisely. We’re very dominant in the Americas, Europe and Asia. The best and largest telecom companies in the world choose Amdocs over and over. We believe the Gulf region incarnates innovation in a way that you don’t see in other regions, and we think that we can play a key part here. This region has a very high appreciation for quality, and we are, by far, again the leader in this space. We believe that they will understand that we are the right choice for them, so they can also make the Gulf region amazing. We really look forward to doing business in the Gulf. It's taken a while for us to arrive, but now we have arrived, and we look forward to the future.
Apart from 5G and digital, you seem to be going big on the metaverse. How big of an opportunity do you think metaverse will be for telecoms providers in the Gulf and globally?
To put it into perspective, what we see now in terms of the metaverse is almost like what we witnessed in 2007 when the iPhone launched. Nobody realized how the iPhone would change the world and lead to the explosion in mobile data, the endless applications and services that consumers enjoy today and the endless amount of data and connectivity they consume. The Metaverse is this type of revolution in its magnitude. It's a new platform that requires not only a lot of bandwidth but intelligent connectivity. We believe that when telecommunication companies implement and launch super-fast and intelligent networks, this will allow this new revolution to unfold and, with it, super exciting applications and services that we can't even imagine today. If you asked me in 2007 which apps would be launched, I couldn't have imagined a fraction of what was launched over the last 15 years with the iPhone and all the other devices. And in the same way, I cannot even imagine what will happen with the metaverse, but I can imagine it to be amazing. It will open up a whole new level of connectivity and experience. With the metaverse, we experience the internet from within, and it's such a profound experience for education, healthcare and manufacturing, among many others. This will create a whole new era of connectivity and experiences for consumers and enterprise customers.
You’ve talked about the “four forces” that are shaping telco CX. Can you tell us more about these?
The first chapter is 5G. 5G is not just another evolution of 4G and just a faster network like 4G was for 3G. 5G really takes the network to a new level because new capabilities that were never there before are now being launched. That enables intelligent, smart, super-fast services to be launched.
The second chapter talks about a revised vision or mission for broadband. What we realized over the last few years, because of the pandemic, is that the home is a really important place for connectivity. And it's not just about connecting the home; it's making sure that every home and every room is connected and that we can provide priority of service for people who work from home. In fact, in our studies, depending on the region, between 30 to 50% of employees will have at least one or two days of work from home, which means the new office is home.
The third chapter talks about the metaverse and a new era of connectivity and experiences.
The fourth chapter is a really interesting aspect of consumer behavior. We identified, based on global surveys that we conducted, a type of consumer which we call “the fluid consumer.” It is basically everybody who chooses to select services in a way that wasn’t possible before, all thanks to connectivity, such as car-hailing services, on-demand entertainment and media services. It’s all about consumer behavior and how we, as an industry, can adapt. And for Amdocs, it's our mission to make sure that our products are flexible enough to allow our customers to serve the fluid future.
