BSS Vendor of the Year, Special Editor Recognition Award: Most Innovative Vendor of the Year: Amdocs |
Erwann Thomassain, Amdocs' head of marketing for Asia Pacific, discusses this year's highlights.
This has been a good year for Amdocs as we witnessed positive results. In January we unveiled Amdocs CES 8, an advanced product portfolio designed to enable service providers to run leaner while preparing them to lead in the connected world where it's predicted that by 2017 more than seven trillion devices will require support.
What are the key trends supporting your growth?
Asia Pacific has a burgeoning telecom sector, with significant opportunities for service providers. To capture the new opportunities of the connected world, they need to become tera-play providers, supporting trillions of devices and applications connected to the network.
Service providers in Asia Pacific are facing unique challenges - significant subscriber and network event growth alongside an increased demand for new services. New advanced 3G networks are being deployed, handset innovation is on the rise and more services and applications are constantly emerging. At the same time, customers are largely prepaid and highly price sensitive, leading to price wars and high churn rates.
To meet these challenges, service providers need to provide a superior prepaid experience across all interaction points in order to retain customers and grow loyalty. Among other things, this calls for the implementation of highly-scalable, real-time charging systems, alongside other business supports systems prepared to support the emerging connected world, in which trillions of devices and applications, not just phones, will be connected to the network.
Service providers need to be able to quickly launch new offers and packages to attract customers and remain competitive. Although postpaid customers currently make up a relatively small portion of the customer base, they represent a significant portion of their revenues and are of strategic importance. Some operators have begun to introduce hybrid models and convergent offers that combine prepaid and postpaid services within the same offer, such as family accounts. This highlights the growing importance of adopting a convergent real-time charging platform as well as the need for centralized customer and product management.