Amdocs Bringing More Integration And Analytics To Product Line

Amdocs Ltd. appears to be preparing to bust out from its telecommunications pigeonhole. The company, which provides billing and customer-relationship-management software primarily for telcos, next week will roll out updated billing, CRM, and order-management modules; tighter integration of its product line; and a partnership with SAS Institute Inc.--all of which could eventually lead it into new markets.

The SAS partnership, which is designed to bring more analytics capabilities into Amdocs' software by providing customers with a service overlay they can use to gain more contextual analysis of customer data, is probably the most significant development, Yankee Group analyst Jason Briggs says. It's the deepest partnership either company has formed to date, and a move Amdocs had to make, Briggs says. "Do you want to create your own analytical platform and then train your customers how to use it, or would you like to let them use something they're already comfortable with?" he asks. "If you look around the telco market, there are a ton of SAS deployments."

Briggs says he expects Amdocs and SAS to test their partnership within the telecommunications market--particularly in the area of assessing customer profitability--before taking a combined offering to other vertical industries.

The move to provide tighter preintegration of its various products is Amdocs' most-concerted effort yet to tie its widely used billing and order-management tools with the Clarify CRM technology it acquired from Nortel Networks Ltd. in 2001. The goal is to better enable and simplify business processes that have to tap each of the systems, such as rolling out new services or fielding customer billing inquiries, says Scott Kolman, director of product marketing for Amdocs' CRM division. By giving telcos the ability to put more data in the hands of customer-service agents, Amdocs is trying to give its clients more control over their interactions with customers. "We're trying to make sure the customer experience, regardless of channel, is the experience you intended them to receive."

Amdocs also is introducing tools for defining, automating, and managing business processes to help customers better synchronize their processes with their billing, order-management, and CRM systems.

But Amdocs' move to beef up its preintegration and improve its business-process support won't give it a competitive advantage if it tries to branch out into the larger CRM market, says Denis Pombriant, a Beagle Research Group analyst. "These are all good things to do, but it strikes me as catch-up," says Pombriant, noting that Siebel Systems Inc.'s call-center software already integrates not only with other Siebel products, but also with additional data sources.

Still, Pombriant says Amdocs is improving its ability to hold on to its current customers as Siebel and other CRM competitors attempt to make inroads in the telco market. "These upgrades give their customers a good reason to take a hard look at Amdocs before making a decision to change."