OSS Line

Amdocs AIDA

Amdocs AIDA  was recently announced at their InTouch show, apparently to ‘genuine applause’. Detail is currently sparse, but the promise is of a solution that finally unlocks the value in all that telco data…

Based on the limited information shared so far by Amdocs, AIDA has been called a Business Intelligence (BI) solution for telco, but this is either selling it short or vastly underestimating the issues of data integration in OSS and BSS.

Eventually, AIDA has to do BI. This is the end goal. Once all the dirty, complicated data munging, moving and cleaning is done. BI analyses the data and tells you something useful. The Amdocs opportunity here is to compete with ‘generic’ BI vendors like Oracle by providing a product that is tuned to telco data and telco business.

But before you see nice graphs and pie charts there’s a huge job to be done:  Tying BI features up to multiple data sources that have different storage mechanisms, different APIs and are updated to different time horizons. Once the data is accessed, one must determine its meaning, normalize the names of things in the data, and start combining shared references to the same things to build up the currently missing big-picture.

There’s whole companies based around accessing or transforming telco data. Ontology and Celona come to mind. Both offer very smart solutions to one aspect of data access. AIDA has to do this and more.

It will be interesting to see where AIDA focuses its efforts initially. On data access. On BI. Or on something more exciting like making the insight actionable by tying it in to their OSS planning and forecasting tools.

The biggest risk is that AIDA becomes another 'big-bang' transformation project rather than a solution that can deliver a return on investment today while enabling the long journey necessary to change data, process and business.

Data integration is the second most difficult OSS challenge after process integration (and usually you can’t have one without the other). Even if AIDA has the whizz-bangiest technology behind it, even if it’s smarter than dedicated data-meisters like Ontology and Celona, there will be plenty of opportunity for Amdocs to sell system integration days.

But perhaps Amdocs are the guys who can pull this off. I certainly wouldn’t criticise them for having a licenses and services revenue model for AIDA. A pragmatic approach, acknowledging the need for services effort, might work in their favour.  The big opportunity here is that Amdocs could have both the technology and the project clout to do the job.

Management World 2010 Q&A - Amdocs

In the first of a series of articles, OSS Line finds out what software vendors and service providers are expecting from TM Forum’s Management World 2010. What’s hot? What's not? And why do we make the trip to Nice every year?

First up, it’s Amdocs. Cassandra Millhouse, Director of Product Marketing, Amdocs OSS Division, gives us the skinny on what one of the industry’s biggest players expects to get from the show…

Amdocs’ presence at Management World has grown over the last five years as it moved from offering mainly BSS products and services to become a major player in both the OSS and BSS industry. What is Amdocs’ offering service providers today?

Amdocs combines business and operational support systems, service delivery platforms, proven services, and deep industry expertise to enable service providers and their customers to do more in the connected world. Amdocs’ offerings help service providers explore new business models, differentiate through personalized customer experiences, and streamline operations. A global company with revenue of $2.86 billion in 2009, Amdocs has approximately 18,000 employees and serves customers in more than 60 countries worldwide.

Is Management World still the major OSS show of the year for Amdocs?

Yes. It is one of the most important shows globally, but we also participate in TMW events regionally in the US and Asia, as well as other events like Broadband World Forum, Carrier Ethernet World, Mobile World Congress, Communicasia and Futurecom.

What will Amdocs be up to in Nice this year?

Amdocs’ executives and customers will lead and participate in panels outlining strategies, solutions and best practices for addressing the capacity crunch, building a differentiated customer experience, and achieving the operational efficiencies and business agility to keep ahead of the competition.

At booth #1 in the Exhibit Hall, Amdocs will showcase products from its Customer Experience Systems portfolio that help service providers cope with capacity demands, industrialize service introduction and service fulfillment through automation, and bridge the planning gap between marketing and operations.

Amdocs has been a big supporter of catalyst projects in the past. The Harmony project is going in to its sixth iteration in Nice, so what’s happening in the Forumville this time?

Amdocs will be joining onsite working groups and catalyst projects to develop standards that apply to real world management needs, including:

• Standardizing MCE – Harmony 6; A standardized solution for customer experience and service quality management, focusing on media and cloud services.
• Successful Inventory Transformation - framework for Complex OSS Migrations; Live demonstration based on real case scenarios encountered by Telstra.

Is there any speaker you really want to catch this year at Management World Nice?

We look forward to seeing Iain Morris from the Economist Intelligence Unit, who will be discussing insight arising from research commissioned by Amdocs to look at how service providers can decide which business model will provide best fit to their existing skills and resources.

The Nice show is always a very social occasion for the vendors. Heard of any good Management World parties?

Amdocs will be hosting its customers and partners at a Gala Dinner, featuring some v. special entertainment.

I hope it’s these guys, but I doubt it. Finally, what do you expect to get out of TMW next week?

We look forward to the opportunity to meet with our customers and industry experts to learn about the challenges facing the communications industry, as well as how these are being addressed through innovation across the market.

Thanks! If you want to contact Amdocs about the show drop a mail to Karen.Burnside@amdocs.com or go to their Management World page.

Amdocs Product Catalog Win at Telenet

People are buying product catalogs! Belgium’s Telenet has purchased Amdocs Enterprise Product Catalog (EPC).  The solution fits with EPC’s core value proposition: Replace all the disparate databases and catalogs throughout the organization to provide a single view of what’s being sold.

Consolidation is step one. You then need a business process that maintains and uses a single view of products, and you would also benefit from some sort of integration that pushes product specs out to order management, fulfillment, billing and so on.

EPC can be deployed on its own to handle the data side of consolidation, either replacing existing systems or reading/updating remaining legacy catalogs. It’s a quick win as, in most cases, legacy product catalog data sources are not tightly coupled to service fulfillment automation.

EPC is one of those products that straddles OSS and BSS. Naturally much product data ‘belongs’ to the BSS tier, but EPC is also integrated with Amdocs Cramer OSS to allow service specifications to be implemented by inventory design and assign processes.

Press release is here.

Amdocs OSS Win at Telenor Sweden

Amdocs have sold some OSS stuff to Telenor Sweden to manage inventory and automation of their wire-line network.

It is worth noting, as the PR does, that Amdocs products are already deployed to manage Telenor Sweden’s mobile network. This new deal presumably adds wire-line network, but it is not clear whether the new project includes 2G, 3G, IP, TDM backhaul for mobile, or some other network. Or all of the above.

Read ‘more’ (but no more actual detail) in the Amdocs PR.

Data Migration - Amdocs and Celona

A couple of months ago I talked about data migration and how Celona is taking a ‘productised’ approach to solving the issues that are usually addressed by bespoke integration. Yesterday, Celona teamed up with Amdocs to deliver a webcast on data migration approaches for network inventory. I was keen to find out what’s new with Celona, and learn a bit more about the nature of their publicised relationship with Amdocs.

If TMF post up a recording on their site I suggest you take a look. As webcasts go it was quiet informative, if you have any interest in data migration issues. It explains very clearly Celona’s approach to what is traditionally an area of the system architecture that is rarely designed well or implemented effectively.

Three key points that made me go ‘ooooh’ and/or ‘hmmm’ were:

Celona provide real-time migration. Unlike traditional systems there's no intermediate database or staging of data before loading. Celona performs real-time in-memory manipulation of the data streams. The key benefit of this is that you can have a legacy and target system both running at the same time on a shared dataset, with Celona doing bi-directional updates. Nice!

Celona’s business model. In my previous blog entry on Celona I ask how they generate reliable revenue streams given the perceived short-termness of migration projects. Someone (not me!) asked the direct question. Tony Sceales (CTO) said that they have a flexible approach selling direct or through partners. He made an interesting point that, usually, there’s an on-going need for migration in the customer’s organization. Once a customer looks at the problems and Celona’s solution, he expects them to want to take their product license and use it on future projects.  For partners, Celona support the concept of ‘migration factories’, where the SI buys the product license and uses it as a basis for selling some sort of value-add migration service. Hmmm... I am still not convinced they’ve provided a conclusive answer to the question. 

Amdocs-Celona relationship.  Celona are part of Amdoc’s partner programme, but it wasn’t something they went in to in much detail. Reselling? Amdocs delivering Celona products? Preferred product status? Who knows. The meat of the relationship is the pre-built adapter that allows Celona to integrate with Amdocs Resource Manager inventory. The only pre-built adapter to a COTS product they’re marketing, as far as I can tell. Dipak Pankhania (Celona Senior Consultant) was keen to stress that they intend to keep this adapter up-to-date as new Resource Manager versions are released.

Celona teased the audience with stories of their on-going project at a major service provider. Naming no names though. Hopefully we’ll soon see some detail about a commercial and project success.

Amdocs Win at Costa Ricas ICE

Amdocs has announced a new OSS deal with Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad, Costa Rica’s national telco and energy company. Along with system integrators GBM (some relation to IBM I believe), they’ll be delivering planning, inventory, discovery, activation, TT, fulfilment and assurance products.

That’s a lot of stuff.

More Business for Amdocs OSS at Sonaecom and Rogers

Two wins to update you on...

On January 21st Amdocs announced a win for both an OSS and BSS solution at Canadian communications and media company Rogers. The extended multi-year contract will support quad-play services across their wireless, cable and telephony network.

On January 27th Amdocs announced a win to expand use of their OSS platform at Portugal's Sonaecom, managing xDSL and FTTH.

The Rogers win is probably cause for celebration inside Amdocs. From the PR it appears to be predominantly an extension to continue to support a BSS deployment (Billing and CRM), while adding new features. It does also include a 'service management platform' which I assume is components from Amdocs OSS service management suite. Selling OSS and BSS together has historically been tough for any company in this industry, thus a single agreement to deploy solutions in both areas goes some way to validating Amdocs' all-encompassing Customer Experience System proposition.

Amdocs win at Vodafone D2

Another OSS win at Amdocs’ favourite communications service provider Vodafone. This time it’s a win at the German subsidiary, Vodafone D2. Here’s the PR.

Amdocs’ strength in mobile OSS is in network planning and build which plays to D2’s requirement for a system to aid convergence with the Arcor network acquired in May 2008.

Vodafone Selects Amdocs Operational Support Systems

Amdocs continues to build on the success of the Cramer suite of OSS products within the Vodafone group of companies. Today Amdocs announced a win, presumably comprising product licenses and services, to allow Vodafone to deploy OSS to manage IP/MPLS data networks across Europe.

The size of the deal was not mentioned in the press release, as published by Market Watch, however its importance can't be underestimated from a strategic perspective.

Amdocs OSS Division, and as Cramer before acquisition, has had a good relationship with Vodafone subsidiaries built on successful sales such as Vodafone Ireland, MTC-Vodafone and a long relationship with Vodafone in the UK. Success at a subsidiary level is no guarantee of success at a group level, and I have no doubt that this new deal was hard fought for. There's plenty of software vendors supplying data network solutions, with companies like Netcracker showing more focused effort in Europe over the last 24 months.

Amdocs have successfully sold a data solution, where Netcracker and the activation-centric OSS competition are traditionally strong, and have done so through a new procurement channel to the group organization. In doing so Amdocs has assured their position in Vodafone and secured a critical win to maintain dominance in the European market.