Oracle and Amdocs: Enabling communication service provider evolution

Oracle is pleased to announce an expanded partnership with Amdocs—a relationship expected to empower communication service providers (CSPs) with predictability, performance, and choice when operating business applications and managing critical data in the cloud. CSPs can now confidently migrate, deploy, and operate Amdocs operations support systems (OSS), business support systems (BSS) and other Amdocs network solutions on any of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)’s 45 public cloud regions and distributed cloud solutions. OCI provides CSPs with a highly secure, and resilient, carrier-grade cloud and data platform.

Evolution is inevitable

We often hear competitive strategies include a term at risk of being overused: Digital transformation. Digital transformation is a powerful construct in the macro sense because it enables business and strategy evolution, both being survival tactics. Business process and customer journey transformations are close relatives to digital transformation. They’re natural destinations. Regardless of its unique construct, at the root of all digital transformation is the efficient and effective application of modern technology and IT operations, often accompanied by the migration to and use of the cloud.

Applying transformation efforts to the global CSP industry reveals a landscape populated by both impressive improvements over time and areas of operation that are overdue for modernization. But transformation is difficult, can be costly, and often results in culture shift, all of which are never trivial. CSPs must demonstrate a return against their years of investment in infrastructure. Customer care expectations have evolved from ticket taking and email updates to something more personal, real-time. and transparent.

The benefit is naturally revenue-driven through new products, new monetization strategies and latent customer demand. The post-modernization era, which is inevitable, promises results that are expected to yield massively improved digital customer experience, dynamically support new monetization strategies, and offer increased efficiencies across network operations and service provisioning through cloud native architectures and artificial intelligence.

Where OCI and Amdocs fit in

To that end, Amdocs’ market-leading OSS and BSS, including Amdocs CES9.cloud, network automation and IT solutions, enable CSPs to run their existing businesses, modernize as they are ready, and quickly operationalize new services in an efficient and cost-effective way. Amdocs' Customer Experience Suite (CES) and other telecommunications (telco) applications running on OCI offer CSPs the ideal platform to build their 5G and other next generation business models in a secure, efficient, and cloud native manner.

With 45 public cloud regions, OCI offers customers a reliable and performant platform to run telco applications wherever they need in the world. OCI also offers a broad portfolio of distributed cloud solutions, such as dedicated region and Alloy, which bring public cloud capabilities directly to the customer's data center. This availability enables CSPs to not only migrate mission-critical applications with limited downtime, but also helps them meet stringent data residency standards, such as GDPR. CSPs are increasingly adopting a multicloud approach, and OCI has a market leading multicloud offering, inclusive of high-speed interconnections with other cloud providers, such as Azure. 

Modernization of OSS and BSS is imperative

CSP transformation has been an evolving journey over the past 20 years and continues with many maintaining legacy and disparate systems across their OSS and BSS fabric. This complex reality represents a natural friction working against the wanted pace of digital transformation. Complexity can be an anchor to both competitiveness and evolution. To paraphrase Einstein, opportunity can be found within the difficult and complex, and there is significant opportunity for the CSPs who engage in the modernization effort. To that end, CSPs are encouraged, if not compelled, by these opportunities that span modern models of customer centricity and engagement, monetization, product development, and much more.

These opportunities are amplified, and likely accelerated, when combined with a journey to cloud native services and architectures, further reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) and improving overall agility and flexibility. Further, a financial shift is occurring across CSP expenditures given their massive and year’s long investments in 5G and other communications industry requirements. As a result, the expense characteristics for OSS and BSS are shifting from capital expenditure (capex) to operating expenditures (opex) over a multiyear period. Per a recent analyst report, based on executives interviewed from 24 telecom operators, the percentage of telco workloads running in the cloud can increase from an average of 4–23%, which validates the modernization of IT Infrastructure, and OSS and BSS specifically, in the industry. 

In further support of the stated estimation, CSPs often aspire to become end-to-end digital service providers, encompassing fixed network services, cellular, TV, internet and more. The casting away of outdated processes and legacy technology can enable their innovation and hedge against competition. Oracle and Amdocs are well-positioned to help our CSP customers maximize these benefits.

Providing an improved and more tailored customer experience and automating operations are two of the top current priorities for CSPs. Modern OSS and BSS applications deployed in a cloud native manner allow the CSP, more quickly than ever before, to deliver new experiences and capabilities meeting varied customer demand and expectations across market verticals and across multi and omni channel strategies. Modern OSS and BSS use advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). The cloud delivers improved agility driving faster integrations and deployment of services and capabilities.

Cloud nativity enables the adoption of containerization and microservice architectures, which enable frameworks for continuous feature upgrades and maintenance without interruption to existing operations. It also inherently provides scalability to address real-time business needs. Taken as a whole, this function translates into extended business agility and reduces operating expenses.

Ultimately, CSPs require flexibility and scalability across their OSS and BSS fabric as they endeavor to meet current demands in new ways and  in real time with a mix of partner integrations, while simultaneously exploring monetization and delivering and supporting strategies for services that might not yet exist. They can’t efficiently achieve this goal through legacy architectures and platforms. So, the alignment of a modern OSS and BSS in the cloud is nothing short of compelling. Oracle and Amdocs have based their expanded relationship on this foundation.

A powerful partnership committed to customers

Oracle and Amdocs share a common goal: Bring our best-in-class products to customers with exceptional support, helping them to achieve their transformation objectives. With the Oracle-Amdocs partnership, you get differentiated technology and a commitment to work closely with you on your modernization efforts and cloud journey.

Through its range of distributed cloud offerings such as Dedicated Regions and Alloy, OCI allows CSPs to bring a carrier-grade cloud into their own data centers, enabling them to migrate and operate mission critical applications with minimal downtime and latency. This capability can be an initial step to transformation if a CSP isn’t ready for cloud native resources, while also being flexible enough to operate modern applications and architectures.

OCI's unique and powerful architectural features, such as virtualization, nonblocking networks, support for advanced networking, fully managed Kubernetes, and flexible Compute shapes, enable mission critical telco applications to run in a secure, performant, cloud native, and cost-effective way. You can easily migrate Amdocs running on-premises on VMware to OCI using Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, a unique and powerful solution which provides CSPs complete operational control and consistent tooling to seamlessly extend their on-premises environment to the cloud. 

Headwinds to transformation: Skilled staff and legacy technology

Shining a light on the many benefits of modernization of OSSand BSS and IT infrastructure without acknowledging some of the factors that create resistance would be unbalanced. Two of the primary struggles CSPs face are a legacy technology stack and the availability of skilled staff to modernize and operate their infrastructure. CSPs are suffering from an overwhelming skills shortage and find themselves competing with hyperscalers to attract talent. It’s imperative for CSPs to hire people with skills across data analysis, cloud computing, ML, DevOps, AI, and security because these areas are foundational to a modern OSS and BSS architecture. Many CSPs are investing in their current staff to upskill and reskill them, but this process is not brief.

They can mitigate this skillset barrier through the combination of OCI’s varied infrastructure services coupled with Amdocs’ consulting and management capabilities. Customers can engage with Oracle and Amdocs where the entire solution is procured and managed through Amdocs or discretely with each provider where Oracle and Amdocs work together to define and support the solution.

Next steps

OSS and BSS modernization, digital transformation, and cloud adoption are imperatives for CSPs because they look to monetize their existing 5G services, enable network automation, and evolve to become end-to-end digital service providers. A modern cloud-native OSS and BSS and IT architecture coupled with analytics and ML and AI are the required tools for CSPs to realize these goals.

The Amdocs and Oracle partnership bring CSPs the combination of a leading OSS and BSS and IT solutions provider and a highly performant carrier-grade cloud provider. The time to engage and adopt is now. To learn more, see Oracle Strategic Partner—Amdocs and Amdocs Partners Oracle.