Sarit Assaf is the general manager of Amdocs Technology where she manages the technical foundation of all offerings and products including cloud and micro-services. A 28-year veteran of the company, her in-depth industry experience places her in prime position to help CSPs unpick the challenges of 5G monetisation and identify the technologies needed to support the strategies that will enable CSPs to thrive across 5G and into the future.
Here, she tells VanillaPlus that, while all CSPs face different challenges, have different organisational dynamics and consequently have different goals, the technical answers in the forms of cloud, AI and GenAI and more agile and flexible IT are in place. The business models of monetisable CSP services will continue to evolve but increased automation, greater flexibility and continued accuracy in charging will enable CSPs to succeed.
VanillaPlus: Where are we on the road to 5G monetisation and how is Amdocs helping service providers?
Sarit Assaf: While there has been rapid progress towards 5G standalone (SA) over the past year, it’s clear that monetisation challenges still exist. Network slicing and edge technologies haven’t met expectations yet while exposure of network APIs is showing promise for unlocking value. CSPs are therefore balancing maximised utilisation of their existing 3G and 4G assets while smoothly evolving to 5G SA.
Most are taking an iterative approach rather than moving to 5G as part of a ‘big bang’ strategy. This is partly to align the introduction of 5G infrastructure with novel services that generate new revenue streams. By prioritising these, they can ensure they retain flexibility for the future and are able to adapt their monetisation strategies to take full advantage of rapidly changing opportunities as they emerge.
Consumer ARPU growth has been limited and this has led to increased focus by CSPs on the enterprise market with B2B2X models and API exposure coming into focus. In this moment of creating new value from networks in how and who they serve, we foresee AI-driven digital engagement and network operations reducing costs and driving new business.
Becoming business driven is now critical to maintaining competitiveness and this stretches beyond systems to the breath of users within the CSP or enterprise who are interacting with the underlying network technology. Empowering business users across these organisations to engage with the network and configure new services intuitively is paramount to driving new revenue today. They are focused on launching new services quickly and easily, allowing them to adapt and experiment with different monetization schemes and business models.
CSPs are navigating the complex landscape of 5G adoption, focusing on revenue, flexibility and the promising use cases that are realistic today while being ready to monetize opportunities of the future as they emerge.
VP: Clearly not all service providers are the same so how is Amdocs resolving the various states they are in they are in when it comes to monetisation?
SA: There is huge diversity among CSPs across multiple dimensions from the economic conditions they operate in to the maturity of their technology rollouts. Within those variables there is room for many different approaches, and we have extensive experience of working with CSPs worldwide such as AT&T, Bell, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Globe and Telkomsel. At the same time, we are also supporting emerging digital brands and smaller operators who want to launch new LoBs [lines of business] with a fast time to market, leveraging a cost effective, light weight charging engine.
We believe that agile monetisation is crucial for the success of new services and that CSPs have diverse needs. For this reason, Amdocs offers a charging engine that addresses the industry’s diverse challenges – highly flexible and adaptable to create cashable moments from any scenario/context. Scalability is also a priority because systems need to support CSPs with hundreds of millions of subscribers and potentially billions of connections as well as support CSPs’ needs for cost-effective packages that enable them to start small and scale up emerging lines of business.
CSPs are re-evaluating past 5G monetisation decisions and looking for faster integration and business agility as they prioritise avoiding the monetisation missteps of the past. For some, this has seen reliance on smaller, specialised charging vendors resulting in integration challenges that have caused unacceptable delays to time-to-value. More powerful integration agility is necessary to accelerate this.
At the other extreme, CSPs have found charging systems that were bundled into legacy monolithic stacks by network equipment vendors that don’t meet their needs for flexibility and efficiency today. Amdocs Charging can seamlessly integrate with existing monetisation ecosystems and deliver adaptability that elevates a CSP’s responsiveness to market shifts and caters to growing business lines, such as IoT in the transport vertical, for example.
Harnessing technologies such as AI and GenAI is important for enhancing operational efficiency and enabling issues to be addressed before they become problematic. They can also be applied to assist rapid responses to swiftly changing market dynamics. We see charging as providing the critical lens through which value is captured from early service deployments, with AI capabilities enabling prediction and automation of new monetisation opportunities. In this way, Amdocs Charging acts as a network treasury, enabling fast start and rich future exploitation of opportunities.
Importantly as new models are introduced, Amdocs Charging can be combined with Amdocs Policy, in which Charging acts as the treasury and Policy acts as the brain, enabling efficient 5G network management and further monetisation possibilities.
VP: You mentioned AI and GenAI. What is the realistic view here? Is the technology at risk of being over-hyped?
SA: There’s a lot of hype around GenAI, that’s obvious. Having said that, anyone who has already experienced the available tools in their day-to-day work has already found quantifiable, time saving efficiencies. That’s driving GenAI volume and it’s not hype if tangible benefits can be identified even at this early stage.
We’ve had classic AI use cases for several years. GenAI was not fully imagined at the outset of 5G but it’s now really driving the business case even further and I believe a huge volume of the data moving over 5G will be (Gen)AI-driven within a few years. This means that GenAI is actually an accelerant for 5G with the technology unlocking new trends or accelerating existing ones such as augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR). There is no question that GenAI applications will require connectivity to graphics processing units (GPUs) in the edge or cloud and potentially open up new monetisation models in B2B, B2C and B2B2X.
Amdocs is at the centre of industry developments with our telco-specific amAIz GenAI platform. There is huge interest in this and a vast number of potential use cases are under discussion on both cost and revenue sides of CSPs. In support of these, we have strategic collaborations with Nvidia, AWS, Azure, Google and others who want to interact with our telecoms expertise.
We remain realistic and are working with CSPs to balance their organisational changes and testing AI wherever possible. We’re wary of hype cycles but our approach to AI-enhancement of the catalogue is underway. This is a revolution that will continue.
VP: What do you see as the essentials for CSPs to check in new monetisation and charging systems to drive future services?
SA: There are several to consider but a key requirement is to bring the charging much closer to the network. The close integration of charging with 5G, edge and API possibilities is crucial to the monetisation of the network. We also see the ability to provide support for converged mobile, fixed, pre- and post-paid and consumer and business lines as critical. In one recent scenario, we handled the migration of more than 170 million subscribers onto a new charging platform, with zero downtime. This migration catered for all lines of business and enabled utilisation of open APIs.
As mentioned, this is also balanced with the need to remain cost effective with fast, out of the box, small scale charging solutions for new LoBs or MVNOs – that can be rapidly deployed in a cost-efficient manner – while having the option to scale up and converge if needed.
Keeping it simple is part of our approach. We enable low code/no code configuration for experimenting with new services and pricing models and support a cloud-native approach to enable agility and innovation. With one of our customers we recently integrated and tested advanced end-to-end enterprise 5G use cases – on AWS public cloud. These included IoT connectivity, network slicing as-a-service, 5G FWA pay-per-use, body worn 4k cameras and connected vehicle mobility with visual analytics. We believe all public, hybrid and multi-cloud options need to be on the table now.
In addition to these essentials, openness and collaboration are vital to make use of standards and open APIs to enhance collaboration. This extends beyond CAMARA APIs to other standards including those from TMF and other ecosystems.
The final essential is to incorporate AI and GenAI for transformative impacts such as those I mentioned earlier.
VP: What is the secret sauce for monetisation success from Amdocs’ perspective?
SA: We’ve mentioned it throughout this conversation – the most important aspect is the knowledge and expertise that exists within our industry. We are on a continuously evolving journey and the requirements are going to be different even within functions such as charging and monetisation. Amdocs has the ability to navigate this evolving space and understand the needs of CSPs in all their diversity and from end-to-end. This allows for effective prioritisation and tailored monetisation strategies.
Our coverage of essential domains such as digital engagement, partner management, catalogue, care, monetisation, billing, network automation and orchestration provides the foundation on which customised charging and monetisation approaches can be built for each customer. Our aim is to provide the necessary tools for successful monetisation of 5G and beyond and that includes exposure of APIs and AI.
These capabilities are value-drivers for 5G and Amdocs traditionally plays in the value spaces in response to the needs of CSPs to see more flexibility from their vendors. This is an especially challenging landscape for the telecoms industry to traverse so our efforts are focused on removing CSP headaches and expanding opportunities for our customers. Our view is that monetisation is critical and should be agile, business driven and integrated throughout the CSP and we are proving this to be the case with many of the best CSPs in the world.
SPONSORED INTERVIEW
