Wireline Carriers Face an Era of Major Change in their Business

As the wireline industry starts to look at the new reality of bundling entertainment such as video and gaming as well as voice, there is the necessity for a back office offering that’s pre-integrated with the components that are being offered by the carriers. Eran Wagner, VP of New Business Development shares his views on these issues.

Why has IPTV now become a feasible business proposition?

People have been talking about interactive TV for thirty years. But in my mind, this is the year of IPTV, because technology is available to provide the type of bandwidth to the home that a fully-fledged TV signal receives exactly at a time when voice services are becoming a commodity, and carriers world wide are aching for new revenue streams.

Why do you think that the development of IPTV is now becoming a prevalent strategy amongst telcos?

It’s now becoming clear that the wireline industry needs to adapt to a new reality, beyond providing voice services. Cable companies and other competitors are now offering voice services, and the wireline companies must evolve to be major providers of entertainment and communication services including video, gaming, and other applications.

By leveraging the technological advances that are becoming available, these wireline companies will have the opportunity to continue to dominate the market. It’s a very clear trend in the industry but it will require them to make investments to their network and service infrastructure as well as their business support systems to allow them to create a superior customer experience.

We like to look at it as a three-legged stool. There is the access network, there are the applications such as video-on-demand or voice over IP, and there is the back office which enables the providers to manage and monetise these services. This includes everything from ordering the service to billing for it; from personalising the experience, to targeted advertising; from customer support representative empowerment to self service and consumer empowerment. This contributes to creating the superior customer experience and the ability to make money.

Amdocs’ speciality is providing complete OSS and BSS solutions for carriers and when we say we’re launching an IP convergence solution for IPTV, it means that we have a back office offering that’s pre-integrated with the components that are being offered by the carrier.

We believe that wireline carriers are facing a new era of major change in their business. This change will reflect on everything from their employee base to the systems they use to run their business. This period calls for a deep look into the back office and a serious evaluation of the option to start from scratch. I mean literally build a Greenfield business support infrastructure. That’s where we come in with a unique, integrated, carrier grade solution.

As an example as to why integrated back offices make sense, imagine we contact a wireline carrier and order a multi-service bundle. We attempted this and found that to order a wireline service, a wireless service, data services as well as a video service, and it took maybe three weeks and twenty-one interactions with four different officers.

The perception of the company grows increasingly negative and the cost to the provider goes up. In order to reverse this, you need to overhaul your service ordering and provisioning systems but it also touches so many other back office components. You want to be able to provide this bundle with the minimum amount of time, with the minimum amount of problems. The subscriber wants the service to be as efficient and effective as it can be and the carrier needs to reduce costs. This is essentially what we enable.

We are leveraging the breadth of our product offering, and we’re combining it with consulting services and implementation services. We then add deep domain knowledge of IPTV and video services.

You’re advocating Integrated Customer Management as an approach specifically targeted for IPTV?

Yes, integrated Customer Management is something that goes across the whole portfolio. It’s effectively a way of doing business that will help in moving the business forward to an era where the holistic customer experience is what matters.

Earlier this year we announced Amdocs 6. Amdocs 6 is a set of integrated products we offer. We are now integrating that into a video environment in a way that enables us to take the back office from the dark room to the TV screen.

Imagine a scenario where you not only know how much the movie costs, but you know how much it costs for you because you have consumed other services. Maybe you saw other movies, or you went over your mobile minutes. Because of these various other aspects of your service consumption, you are entitled to see this movie for half the price. This requires real time interaction with the billing and rating systems.

This sort of dynamic interactive type of interface with the subscriber encourages consumption, and at the same time personalises the service. This is a part of what we believe will provide the competitive edge for the carriers of the future. We believe Amdocs can help to provide a truly competitive edge by localising and personalising those services.

Another very critical area is the whole notion of self-service. This serves the purpose of empowering the customers and giving them the freedom to do everything from subscribing to a service and cancelling it, all the way through to disputing charges. At the same time, this is a great cost reduction tool as people need less and less expensive CSR assistance.

One of the revolutions that we believe to take place in the advertising market is with direct channels to subscribers. We will be able to advertise locally in a personalised way. We can take the local pizza place around the corner and advertise to everyone in a certain mile radius and deliver that message to the people that need to get it in a way that’s cost effective for the business. Small and medium businesses will be able to advertise on TV to closely targeted audiences.

Smaller companies don’t do that today due to the cost of advertising. We would like to bring the businesses from the yellow pages and give them access to people’s living rooms.

It is a different world of advertising with low production and delivery costs because it is localised and personalised, and it is also interactive because of different levels of advertising, for example clicking on the banner for more information.

It creates a different advertising world that allows small and medium sized businesses to compete for the segment that they are after. We want to take a leading role in what we call the intentional customer experience and we believe we have expertise and the focus to achieve it better than anyone else in the industry.

We have a live demo that we have been showing to our customers for quite some time now that has generated a lot of interest in the industry. We are demonstrating a live system that is capable of doing all these things that enriches the customer experience through the TV.

Are you actively partnering with different players?

We are integrating and interacting with key players in the IPTV space through our content business unit. We enable the carrier to interact with different providers relevant to them.

There is a focus on IPTV at the moment, but it’s actually more like a connected home approach, which must be what’s down the line in the future. You will see us partnering with people who are offering the services for the connected home because the customer experience is about providing better service and providing better monetisation of that service. Indeed, on the more technical side we are partnering with Microsoft and Alcatel as well as additional players such as Intel, Orca and others.

What is happening with SBC?

Earlier this year Amdocs was awarded a multi-year contract to support Project Lightspeed, the SBC initiative to expand fibre optics deeper into neighborhoods to deliver Internet Protocol or IP-based TV, voice and broadband services. SBC expects the network to reach 18 million households, as part of its initial deployment, by the end of 2007.

We will work to provide a consistent customer service experience at all touch points of the SBC companies, including via the Web, where Amdocs Self Service will help provide a safe and secure online environment to order or pay for services. This will allow SBC to further build customer loyalty, growth and profitability.

For more information please visit http://www.amdocs.com