Shimie Hortig, Group President of the Americas, Cloud and Financial Services at Amdocs discusses the progress of CSPs in cloud adoption, the strategies for moving their core and non-core systems to the cloud and the role Amdocs can play in CSPs’ cloud modernization journey.
Kevin Gray:
Hi, my name is Kevin Gray, publisher over at Fierce Wireless, and I'm excited to be here today with Shimie Hortig, President of America's over at Amdocs. Today we're going to be talking a lot about the status of CSPs and the cloud, including where the industry is today, what we can expect in the year ahead, and of course, the role that Amdocs plays in all of this. So Shimie, thanks again for joining us here today. Let's go ahead and just get right into it. If you could please tell us briefly a little bit about yourself, about Amdocs, and of course, Amdocs involvement in the cloud.
Shimie Hortig:
Yes, thank you and good morning. As you mentioned, I'm leading the Amdocs business in the Americas, supporting customers in Canada, US, and Latin America. I've been in this role for more than five years. In addition to that, I'm also leading the Amdocs Global Cloud practice, which finds me in a position that I can talk to most of our customers globally and discuss with them their cloud journey and cloud transformation.
I don't know how much you know, but Amdocs has a very unique business model. Amdocs is a technology company and a services company. As a technology company, we ourselves went through the process of migrating and moving all the portfolio of Amdocs to be cloud native.
As a technology engineering company, we had to go through this process, and I think we have the know-how and what it means and what it takes to move your technology to the cloud native, cloud computing technology of Amdocs today. At the same time, we're also a services company, so we provide a lot of services. Over the last few years, we spent a lot of time and energy and investment, including acquiring companies, to build the Amdocs cloud practice so that we can provide services and help our customers to transform and to become their partner for this journey.
Kevin Gray:
So, let's go to the next question here then. So, from what you see in the market right now, I know you're talking to all sorts of operators across the Americas, what are you seeing as the key motivations driving CSPs to adopt the cloud?
Shimie Hortig:
So first, I think we can say today that all our customers understand the value of the cloud. If you were to ask me the same question maybe two, three years ago, it was a little bit more debatable. But today I think everyone understands the value and that’s why they're pushing and moving forward to the cloud.
I think from the CSP perspective, their goals were always one of the following. The first objective is always to be able to launch new services and drive new revenue growth, and to push forward in terms of growth as a company. The second goal was always: let's look for efficiencies; let's look at how to do things better, and reduce cost from everything we do. And the third goal was to better serve the customers, to provide a better customer experience and to continue the digital transformation that they were going through. So, I think from their perspective, cloud is another way they can meet those goals, and that's why you see all of them embarking on the journey to the cloud.
Now, in terms of specific focus, what we see from all over the world - obviously cloudification of the network is an important area of focus for our customers. They are investing a lot in 5G and obviously trying to get the benefit of this investment. We see many of them closing data centers, so they're looking for ways to move the data centers to the cloud, and by that save a lot of facilities, labor cost, energy, and that's a cost play for our customers. The third area of focus is velocity and agility of their IT infrastructure. I think they're looking to push forward with their cloud transformations and to provide a better experience for the customers. And throughout all of it is always security. They want to make sure that they have the secured systems and they're meeting all the regulation and the compliance that is needed. Security is definitely embedded in all the other goals that they're trying to achieve.
Kevin Gray:
Okay. So, I'd imagine that some operators are certainly more advanced than others, but in general, how mature would you say CSPs are on their cloud journey today?
Shimie Hortig:
From the CSPs perspective, you can understand that they have a very complicated ecosystem. It's a combination of, on one hand, many systems that have been there for decades and were customized and evolved over the years. And together with that, they have the new platforms - the ones that are already cloud native digital platforms - obviously the 5G network and other things that are already done in cloud native infrastructure. And the complexity is coming from the fact that they need to manage this hybrid. So, how do you manage this hybrid and complex environment and how do you move to the cloud when you're not just on legacy or just on new cloud native infrastructure?
I think all our customers today, if I look at them globally, have some cloud strategy. All of them defined it already. They know their aspirations, what they're trying to do, and they already started on the journey and started to execute upon this strategy.
I think that all of them, if you look globally, have partnered with hyperscalers - at least one. In most cases, it's more than one, and they have a strategic partnership with one of the hyperscalers. Now, some of the customers are more advanced in the journey in terms of implementation. I can tell you that, for example, in the US, AT&T is working very closely with us on pushing forward a lot of cloud activities, in partnership with Microsoft. They're deploying, on the one hand, cloud native infrastructure, and on the other hand, migrating existing applications to the cloud. So, I think they are probably on the more advanced side. I think T-Mobile in the US are also quite advanced in this journey. All in all, if you look at it globally, I think most of our customers are already on this journey and are pushing forward this transformation.
Kevin Gray:
Okay, great. So, that's a little bit about where we are today. What is the next big step or challenge, I guess, CSPs are facing on this journey, would you say?
Shimie Hortig:
I think like any journey - and it was the right thing to do - each customer started this journey in the area that was easier for them to implement. Everyone was trying to gain some knowledge, some experience. You can call it they started with the “low hanging fruit” or the applications that were easier to move and to modernize and take to the cloud. I think that right now, in the next wave - and we see it also happening in the last six months - they're getting to the core systems - the more complicated systems, the mission-critical systems that they need to move to the cloud. And that's a much more complicated discussion. Amdocs systems are one of those core mission-critical systems. So, we're having a lot of discussions with our customers right now - what is the best way to move, and to do it in the right way.
You have to balance trying to get all the good benefits that the cloud can give you, with doing it in the best way and to do it slowly and smartly. No one can allow any outage. No one can allow any interruption to the business. So, how do you find the way to touch core systems, which are much more complicated, and move them to the cloud. And those systems, just to remind us, are supporting today billions of transactions every day. They're connecting every user around the globe. So, the art of moving core systems to the cloud - I think that's the next challenge that we and the industry will need to try to overcome in the next few years.
Kevin Gray:
Great. Okay. So, only got time for one more question, and I have to tie this in for this interview of course, right? So, what is the role Amdocs can play in all of this, in terms of CSP cloud adoption?
Shimie Hortig:
Yeah. So, Amdocs has been a partner for the industry for many, many years, for several decades. And every decade there's a different challenge that we are embarking on together with our customers - trying to help them move forward.
With the cloud transformation, I think we have two roles. The first one - since we are working globally and we are exposed and partnering with all our customers all over the world - we accumulate a lot of knowledge on cloud transformation and what works well, what does not work well and what can be done better. So, we are trying to bring this global industry knowledge back to our customers and help them define and execute their cloud strategy, leveraging all the knowledge that we see right now all over the world.
And the second goal, which I think is our role - and I mentioned it before because I think this is the next big challenge of the industry in terms of moving to the cloud, - is how to move the core systems to the cloud? And again, each and every one of our customers is working today on a different Amdocs platform. Some of them are 20, 30 years old. Some of them are 10 years old. Some of them are five years old. But for each customer, we will work diligently to find the right technological path, how we can move them, what are the best practices to move you from whatever system you're working on today to your cloud environment, and how to partner with you and help you do that. And I think our customers right now are relying on us and working very closely with us on how we can help them in this transformation of the core systems. And here, I think it's our opportunity to help the industry move it to the next level.
Kevin Gray:
All right. That's all the time we have for today Shimie. Thank you so much for joining us and hopefully we can do this again sometime.
Shimie Hortig:
Thank you. Have a good day.