Amdocs InTouch: The importance of customers experience to face competition

Good morning, everybody. After such an opening, everything I would say would be a downgrade, but I'll try to keep it short. First of all, I really want to thank everybody for showing up for Touch. We have more than 200 customers here and about 100 media, industry analysts, and partners in this convention, which shows that most of you—I hope all of you—think there is value in talking to us. We believe in this type of event because it's an opportunity for us not only to show what we have been working on but also to collect input and feedback from you. At the end of the day, it's a very close industry. My investors sometimes criticize us for focusing so much on one thing—BSS and OSS—for the telecom industry, be it satellite, wireless, wireline, broadband, what have you. But we believe part of our strength is the focus, and this type of interaction makes us even better. So please interact with us as much as you can. I'm sure that all of you have better things to do than coming over here. It's a great hotel and a great venue. The smoke is not exactly what we hope for, but we asked and even our friends from Indonesia could not change it. So we'll have to cope with it and get the maximum out of it. I would like to talk about the trends we see and why Asia-Pacific, Southeast Asia, and in general the growth regions of the world—including Central Latin America, including Russia and others—are so much of an interest for us and why we believe we can be so successful. We've been very active in this area. We invested heavily in the last couple of years in Asia Pacific and Southeast Asia. Part of the testimony to this success, I would say, you will hear during the day—three CEOs from the region: Ellen of SingTel, of XL, and MSU from Globe in the Philippines. They will talk about their vision and how Amdocs is helping them materialize this vision. But the main reason why we believe we are so relevant, especially in the last couple of years here and in other growth areas of the world, is because of the trend of the industry. What we've been seeing is a major shift from simple land grabbing—I would call it—that was the name of the game for about the last five or ten years with simple prepaid and relatively simple offering. There is a steady move towards more complex services and other ways to engage with the end consumer—big consumer, small media businesses, or large enterprises. It has to do with changes that are demographic and economical. We see a major uplift, actually a constant one, in the standard of living all around Southeast Asia, all around Central Latin America, and other places. And we have seen higher competition between mature operators and challenges. When you have competition and you have more sophisticated and more educated consumers and customers, the shift is toward customer experience as a differentiator. Everything else is actually a commodity. Everybody else is using the same base stations, the same fiber optics, the same bridges and multiplexers, even. So the major difference is the customer experience. The customer experience is our middle name. We bet the company many, many years ago around this topic, and we are glad that we see the growth regions of the world following in the same direction. So it's not a miracle. We just have been working very hard for many years to be relevant to these types of regions. It goes to customer experience, it goes to convergence. We don't really care if it's prepaid or postpaid. We don't really care if it's data or voice or video. All of our systems are real time, and they don't distinguish between different types of bits and bytes and different types of customers. So customer experience, convergence, and on top of all of that, of course, innovation. Innovation is our middle name. Of course, we have hundreds of patents, but that's not the systematic thing. What we really have is a systematic machine that is enriching our product set all the time, and that is done in cooperation with our customers. Maybe one thing that is very relevant in this context is the new innovation center that we opened with Singapore Telecom in the R&D center—the largest one is in Israel. Ellen, Lou, and myself, I think around March time frame, several months ago, opened this innovation center. That's actually the second open innovation center we have, following AT&T—we did the same thing with AT&T about a year earlier. The notion there is to harness small companies and innovative companies to enrich and accelerate the innovation we have in-house. So it's a very important program for us, a very important program for our customers. And just another way to accelerate innovation. But when we talk about innovation, we're talking about systematic innovation. We need to be innovative at the carrier-grade, central-office level, as we used to call it, every single version. And that's the time to mention that we invested another $250 million in a year and a half to upgrade what used to be the most sophisticated and best BSS stack in the world—from CS8 to CS9, and we announced it recently. So that's just to show you that we don't really rest on our laurels. We just make sure that we continue to innovate, we continue to create new products, and part of the stack or outside of the stack. And we're moving on. Part of the thing you can see obviously in the demonstration here. Some other things you'll have to come and see our R&D center to get exposure to all of it. The last thing I would like to mention is that we do not believe in magic. Basically, Amdocs, despite the hundreds of patents, despite the 20,000 people that work very hard every day, the reason why we got to $3.3 billion in sales, constantly growing, is because we do certain things and we do them very well. The company is very focused. It has a very special business model. We allow people to buy software from us, implementation services from us, all the way to managed services from us—the entire span of products that cover the entire BSS stack, the entire span of services for all lines of business within telecom. This is a very unique business model. Actually, no one else is trying to—or well, some other people are trying to imitate us, but it's very difficult. And when you do something, and you do it for 31 years—out of them about 25 years in customer care and building BSS or OSS in this space—and you do it very systematically, and you add a lot of hard work and dedicated people, and the best customer set in the world, you mix it all up and improve it every year. After 31 years, you get quite good at what you do. So we don't think that we are perfect. We are not even close to that. So we are here again to listen to you, to get the fine-tuning. We are not going to change CS9 after the input of this—don't get me wrong—but we are going to improve it and improve it. So 9.1 and 9.2 and 10 will be actually better and better all the time. So we have a long day to go. I hope that we can provide you some value and justify the reason you came here. I really, really thank you for coming, and thank you very much.