Amdocs (NASDAQ: DOX), is a leading provider of billing systems, customer care, and support for the communications industry in North America, Europe, and the rest of the world. A global company with revenue of about $1.8 billion (USD) in fiscal 2004, Amdocs employs over 9,500 IT professionals and serves customers in more than 40 countries around the world.
Headquartered in Ra'anana, Israel, Amdocs has long been the leader in the world of telecommunications billing, by long supplying operations support software (OSS) used by telecommunications service providers to deliver voice, data, and wireless services to their customers. OSS is a generic term for a suite of software programs that enable an enterprise to monitor, analyze, and manage a network system. The term was originally applied to communications service providers (CSP), referring to a management system that controlled telephone and computer networks. However, the term has since been applied to the business world in general to mean a system that supports an organization's network operations. To that end, Amdocs' software includes modules for customer service, billing, sales, and audits, while it also offers sales and publishing software for developing print and on-line directories. It is a technology company that engages in the provision of product-driven information system solutions to major telecommunications companies.
The company's product offerings now include a library of OSS, whose core elements include customer resource management (CRM), order management, call rating, invoice calculation, bill formatting, collections, fraud management and directory publishing services, while its managed services include information technology (IT) outsourcing, application outsourcing, and business process outsourcing (BPO), particularly for customer service and data center operations. In fact, a large proportion of Amdocs' 2004 revenue came from managed services, where the company saw continued strength in its directory services business and enhanced relationships with important existing customers. For instance, following the completed acquisition of Certen from Bell Canada in mid-2003, Amdocs took over the managed services responsibilities for Bell, Existing managed services agreement with Bell extends through December 2010. Amdocs has also continued to develop an integrated billing platform to replace legacy systems built on a product-by-product basis. Thus it has further contributing to Bell's productivity improvement goals and enabling Bell to deliver on its one integrated bill commitment to its customers.
Amdocs Ensemble suite of products encompasses several key customer care, billing and order management systems (CC&B systems) application areas, such as customer care; order management; event processing; invoicing; and fraud management. Moreover, through the acquisition of a former CRM leader Clarify in 2001 (see Clarity of Vision: Clarify Sold to Amdocs by Nortel), Amdocs also became a noteworthy player in the CRM and call center areas, so that, in terms of the OSS side of a communication customer or a CSP, most data of any effect is captured and managed by an Amdocs solution. To that end, Amdocs ClarifyCRM product offers solutions that help companies better perform and manage selling processes across multiple sales channels. The major suite, Amdocs ClarifyCRM Service and Support, offers solutions spanning support centers, contact centers, and self-service solutions, although the product offers certain marketing and analytics capabilities too.
Another related product, Amdocs Enabler, provides flexible, real time rating and billing for all voice, data, content, and commerce services, by offering integrated on-line and off-line charging. It also provides a single product to support both prepaid-postpaid convergence and wire-line and wireless convergence. Enabler is pre-integrated with Amdocs ClarifyCRM, which will coordinate the integration of future product upgrades, since Enabler's functionality can be extended through pre-integration with value-added Amdocs products.
In 2003, Amdocs launched major releases of its flagship products. These releases introduced out-of-the-box, productized billing and CRM integration, enabling easier implementation of the products as well as with third-party and legacy applications. This functionality has provided customers with the potential to achieve integrated customer management regardless of their current operating environment, and these releases also provided additional functionality that allows Amdocs' customers to drive profitability within their businesses. For example, Enabler 5 supports new revenue streams and business models with advanced on-line charging capabilities and it supports multi-market and multi-national operations, all on a single platform. On the other hand, ClarifyCRM 12 introduced advanced user interface (UI) technology that delivers more real time, relevant, and actionable customer information to the service agent's desktop, thereby transforming a high-volume call center into a more efficient and effective multi-channel customer contact center.
Amdocs further evolved its CRM offering in 2003 with the acquisition of the technology assets the bankrupt Exchange Applications Inc. (Xchange, see Xchange Adds to the List of CRM Point Solutions' Casualties). Now re-branded as part of the Amdocs ClarifyCRM suite of applications, the campaign management and real time decision-making capabilities obtained through this acquisition complemented Amdocs' traditional strengths in operational CRM, thereby delivering a more complete, closed-loop customer management.
Even during 2002, while battling to secure new finances, Xchange surprisingly managed to build a real time engine to deliver targeted promotions-based capability to detect important customer events and behaviors from transactional data throughout multiple marketing channels within an enterprise. In early 2003 the company announced the release of its former Xchange 9 browser-based suite that enables marketers to automatically trigger an appropriate communication to the customer immediately after they exhibit a behavior representing a cross-sell, up-sell, or retention opportunity, thus answering the question "when" to initiate a marketing interaction.
Further, the Xchange 9 EDM (Event Driven Marketing) Option allowed users to observe data from multiple sources within the enterprise, look for changes to the "state" of the customer, and change direct marketing via the Xchange 9 platform. This development is in sharp contrast to using traditional data mining tools or writing complex structured query language -based (SQL) queries to leverage historical information and to produce predictive models long after the marketing opportunity has past. Nevertheless, the former Xchange applications have since hardly promoted Amdocs as an integrated OSS for CSPs. The reason being that within the marketing automation (MA) market, Amdoc's capabilities have, at best been, described as only "adequate", not "exciting" or "leading".
Headquartered in Ra'anana, Israel, Amdocs has long been the leader in the world of telecommunications billing, by long supplying operations support software (OSS) used by telecommunications service providers to deliver voice, data, and wireless services to their customers. OSS is a generic term for a suite of software programs that enable an enterprise to monitor, analyze, and manage a network system. The term was originally applied to communications service providers (CSP), referring to a management system that controlled telephone and computer networks. However, the term has since been applied to the business world in general to mean a system that supports an organization's network operations. To that end, Amdocs' software includes modules for customer service, billing, sales, and audits, while it also offers sales and publishing software for developing print and on-line directories. It is a technology company that engages in the provision of product-driven information system solutions to major telecommunications companies.
The company's product offerings now include a library of OSS, whose core elements include customer resource management (CRM), order management, call rating, invoice calculation, bill formatting, collections, fraud management and directory publishing services, while its managed services include information technology (IT) outsourcing, application outsourcing, and business process outsourcing (BPO), particularly for customer service and data center operations. In fact, a large proportion of Amdocs' 2004 revenue came from managed services, where the company saw continued strength in its directory services business and enhanced relationships with important existing customers. For instance, following the completed acquisition of Certen from Bell Canada in mid-2003, Amdocs took over the managed services responsibilities for Bell, Existing managed services agreement with Bell extends through December 2010. Amdocs has also continued to develop an integrated billing platform to replace legacy systems built on a product-by-product basis. Thus it has further contributing to Bell's productivity improvement goals and enabling Bell to deliver on its one integrated bill commitment to its customers.
Amdocs Ensemble suite of products encompasses several key customer care, billing and order management systems (CC&B systems) application areas, such as customer care; order management; event processing; invoicing; and fraud management. Moreover, through the acquisition of a former CRM leader Clarify in 2001 (see Clarity of Vision: Clarify Sold to Amdocs by Nortel), Amdocs also became a noteworthy player in the CRM and call center areas, so that, in terms of the OSS side of a communication customer or a CSP, most data of any effect is captured and managed by an Amdocs solution. To that end, Amdocs ClarifyCRM product offers solutions that help companies better perform and manage selling processes across multiple sales channels. The major suite, Amdocs ClarifyCRM Service and Support, offers solutions spanning support centers, contact centers, and self-service solutions, although the product offers certain marketing and analytics capabilities too.
Another related product, Amdocs Enabler, provides flexible, real time rating and billing for all voice, data, content, and commerce services, by offering integrated on-line and off-line charging. It also provides a single product to support both prepaid-postpaid convergence and wire-line and wireless convergence. Enabler is pre-integrated with Amdocs ClarifyCRM, which will coordinate the integration of future product upgrades, since Enabler's functionality can be extended through pre-integration with value-added Amdocs products.
In 2003, Amdocs launched major releases of its flagship products. These releases introduced out-of-the-box, productized billing and CRM integration, enabling easier implementation of the products as well as with third-party and legacy applications. This functionality has provided customers with the potential to achieve integrated customer management regardless of their current operating environment, and these releases also provided additional functionality that allows Amdocs' customers to drive profitability within their businesses. For example, Enabler 5 supports new revenue streams and business models with advanced on-line charging capabilities and it supports multi-market and multi-national operations, all on a single platform. On the other hand, ClarifyCRM 12 introduced advanced user interface (UI) technology that delivers more real time, relevant, and actionable customer information to the service agent's desktop, thereby transforming a high-volume call center into a more efficient and effective multi-channel customer contact center.
Amdocs further evolved its CRM offering in 2003 with the acquisition of the technology assets the bankrupt Exchange Applications Inc. (Xchange, see Xchange Adds to the List of CRM Point Solutions' Casualties). Now re-branded as part of the Amdocs ClarifyCRM suite of applications, the campaign management and real time decision-making capabilities obtained through this acquisition complemented Amdocs' traditional strengths in operational CRM, thereby delivering a more complete, closed-loop customer management.
Even during 2002, while battling to secure new finances, Xchange surprisingly managed to build a real time engine to deliver targeted promotions-based capability to detect important customer events and behaviors from transactional data throughout multiple marketing channels within an enterprise. In early 2003 the company announced the release of its former Xchange 9 browser-based suite that enables marketers to automatically trigger an appropriate communication to the customer immediately after they exhibit a behavior representing a cross-sell, up-sell, or retention opportunity, thus answering the question "when" to initiate a marketing interaction.
Further, the Xchange 9 EDM (Event Driven Marketing) Option allowed users to observe data from multiple sources within the enterprise, look for changes to the "state" of the customer, and change direct marketing via the Xchange 9 platform. This development is in sharp contrast to using traditional data mining tools or writing complex structured query language -based (SQL) queries to leverage historical information and to produce predictive models long after the marketing opportunity has past. Nevertheless, the former Xchange applications have since hardly promoted Amdocs as an integrated OSS for CSPs. The reason being that within the marketing automation (MA) market, Amdoc's capabilities have, at best been, described as only "adequate", not "exciting" or "leading".
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