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In this episode of HFS Unfiltered Stories, Saurabh Gupta, President of Research and Advisory Services at HFS Research, chats with Gil Rosen, Chief Marketing Officer at Amdocs. They discuss Amdocs’ bold move into broader IT services with the launch of Amdocs Studios. Gil explains how Amdocs is uniquely positioned to lead the emerging “services as software” revolution by leveraging its product-led heritage, deep R&D capabilities, and extensive experience in large-scale digital transformations. The conversation explores how Amdocs is working to transcend its telecom roots and redefine the future of IT services.
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This transcript was auto-generated from the original recording and lightly edited for readability. We've done our best to catch errors, but names, technical terms, and company references may be misspelled or imperfectly captured. For the definitive version, please refer to the original audio or video. Views expressed are the speakers' own.
Welcome. Welcome everyone to HFS Unfiltered. Today, I hope we’ll zoom into one of the biggest shifts that we are seeing, which is this rise of services-as-software. This is a term that we coined last year, and it’s been going all over and everybody’s talking about it. And today, we have none other than Gil Rosen, the Chief Marketing Officer of Amdocs, to discuss this with us. Amdocs has been, I think, a telco tech powerhouse for very long — 40 years — and now you’re making waves into the world of IT services with the launch of Amdocs Studio, right? So, Gil, welcome to the show.
It’s nice to be here. Thanks for having me.
So, Gil, before we jump into Amdocs and Amdocs Studio, tell us a little bit about what does being a CMO mean to you today, because you are at the intersection of technology, telco, transformation, all these things. What does a CMO do?
So there are two sides to it. I’ll start from the inside out. Amdocs is a global company. We’re present in 90 countries. We have hundreds of customers — large communication providers, small ones — but they’re spread all over the world. Part of my job is basically evolving the Amdocs story. We started from literally being, let’s call it, a single-product company focusing on the monetization domain, also known as billing. And since then, 40 years ago, we’ve evolved up north, as it’s called, meaning to the experience layer and all the way down to the network. And that happened through many acquisitions that we made, but also, of course, internal R&D. And when you acquire companies, you have to start merging the acquired company stories with your core story. And we’re talking about over 20 companies that we acquired. So one of the things that I found myself doing when I just took on my role about five years ago — we were managing over 20 brands. Each time we acquired a company, the acquired company wanted to stay independent. They liked their own logo and the company name and their vibe. And for them, Amdocs was a big company, and they didn’t want to, let’s call it, join the mothership. So the first thing I had to do was really to create an end-to-end holistic strategy for Amdocs and all its brands and the direction. And it’s one of the biggest decisions that a CMO has to make, whether you go for a House of Brands or a mono-brand strategy. We decided to go for a mono-brand strategy, which meant that we folded all the 20-plus companies into the Amdocs brand, and it took at least two years after we kicked it off. And then really organizing the portfolio in a way that would be meaningful for our customers, so they actually understand — because they knew us as all these different brands, and all of a sudden we have one brand representing all these different capabilities. I think it’s probably one of the biggest and longest-standing challenges I have, that our customers actually realize that we’re much more than what they used to. It sometimes amazes me how much and how quick people put you in a box in a corner and say, this is what you do and this is what you’re good at. And for Amdocs, for many years, for decades, it was billing, it was billing. So I always say we were the Michael Jordan of billing. One of the major jobs that I have is to actually tell the Amdocs story end to end, which has just evolved now to the Amdocs Studio story, which we’ll talk about in a minute. And also, internally within the company, make sure people understand our purpose, understand why they come to work, why they wake up and do what they do, what is the impact we have on the world. And additionally, quite recently, I created an organization dedicated to the marketing technology stack and specifically to AI. That was kind of the trigger to collect everything, because the impact of AI and technology on marketing organizations has been so profound that you really need to specialize in it — a kind of center of excellence for technology and AI within marketing. And then, of course, that is being used by everyone within the marketing organization, but we have a unit that has that as its charter. So that’s internally. With that, taking an industry that’s going through transformation, whether it’s evolution — the evolution that our customers are going through from 3G to 4G to 5G — and it’s not a linear evolution. It’s almost exponential, especially between 4G and 5G. And that’s why it’s been so difficult for many of our customers to actually talk about what is different about 5G, because it’s not just a single use case that everybody’s been used to. When we evolved from 3G to 4G, everybody was just about speed, and speed is easy to sell — faster internet. Everybody wants faster internet. 5G is even faster internet, but people are saying, OK, but I think it’s fast enough. So I want faster, but is that it? And especially in the enterprise domain — I think this is where our customers, the industry, has had issues. In the enterprise domain, one of the things that we understood is that the technology leadership, the CTOs and CIOs, their knowledge of 5G and its capabilities was very limited. Which means that if you’re planning a manufacturing facility, or if you’re planning a hotel, and you do not understand the way 5G can serve you, other than just having connectivity in your hotel, then you’re missing out on something. So we actually highlighted that to our customers, that one of the big issues they have to deal with is not the technology aspect, it’s marketing — teach them, educate your customers on what this new network can do for them, to actually create demand. Because the demand was not there as expected, because everything was just about the next G. Nobody thought that it needs further elaboration. So my job is really to look at the challenges of the industry and not treat them as a vendor, treat our customer as a telco and really understand what they have to educate and the stories that they have to tell their customers, and then really translate that to the story we tell them. And try to live on both sides. So on the research side, we tell them their story and their customers’ story, their consumers, their enterprise customers. And of course, we also have to tell them our story and how we can help. So it’s a very multi-dimensional job. It’s multi-dimensional storytelling.
Gil, I liked how you described yourself as the Michael Jordan of billing. Now, from Michael Jordan of billing, you’ve become Michael Jordan of telco, and now you’re trying to become Michael Jordan for a broader set of services with the launch of this Amdocs Studio. So tell us a little bit about — why are you venturing into broader IT services? Why now? Are you seeing customer demand from your research? Did you want to diversify? What was the rationale behind this launch of Amdocs Studio?
So there are many factors that led to this decision, but the evolution of Amdocs… Amdocs is a very unique company in the sense that we are a product-led services company, meaning at its core, Amdocs is a technology company with an R&D unit, and we launch products, and we have our suite, the CES suite. And the unique part of our business model is that we also implement the suite. So we’re not just a product company, like many platforms, big platforms and hyperscalers. We also have the hands-on delivery, SI capabilities to implement our products within the telecom architecture. Now, over the years, we’ve become very efficient on the implementation side, and because we have such a comprehensive product suite, we find ourselves integrating with hundreds of other information systems, which made us very capable in dealing with many complex projects, many complex integration challenges, and really enabling our customers to take what we haven’t implemented within their stack, but also do that while dealing with many other systems. Over time, we gained confidence in dealing with products that were beyond the Amdocs portfolio. And then when you take a look at how we evolved — because Amdocs believes that, by definition, we’re not just a product company within the telecommunication domain, we are our customer’s strategic partner, which means that we need to be able to serve our customers in their strategic domains, which will contribute to their success. It started with billing, by the way, because billing was the main function of a telecom. You counted minutes. That was it, right? Telecommunication companies were single-product companies. They sold minutes, and we needed to count them. And we took care of all the business aspects of how do you monetize your systems. And then they evolved to additional lines of business, whether it’s broadband, whether it’s wireless, while keeping the traditional wireline. And so on and so forth with media. So the business of, let’s call it, counting all the different products — whether it’s the media products, channels, your wireless subscriptions, several wireless subscriptions, family plans — it became super complex. So we had to extend. And then when you serve all these different products, you obviously need a layer, also known as the experience layer, to be able to have customers go and purchase all these different products and select what you have. So then we understood we actually need to go north in order to create these journeys, which will enable our customers to sell what they have. That journey, by the way, over the last 10 years — we acquired over eight, I believe, user experience studios, which were like boutique studios specializing in high-end user experience consulting, not product-led by any means. Names like projekt202, Big Nerd Ranch — these are the complete opposite of what you think Amdocs is. We collected all these different studios to enable the front-end side. And over time, what we realized, collecting everything from the front-end side — and then while we’re doing this, also the cloud revolution evolved, and all of a sudden our customers need to go through these digital transformations, which requires them also to take their stack up to the cloud. And each one of these missions — basically migrating to the cloud, one; creating an amazing user experience, two; enabling the monetization of all these different models, three — each one of them became an Amdocs capability, starting with an acquisition, and then evolving into a full set of integrated products within the portfolio. When you look at what our customers need, sometimes it’s completely not related to what we have to offer from the traditional stack of what Amdocs creates from the R&D and product perspective. And again, our mission is not to sell our products. Our mission as a company is to make sure our customers are successful. So while we were going through this and carving out this very unique position in the market where we are a product-led company that specializes in integration — creating what we call a single throat to choke, meaning when you integrate our products, we are responsible end to end. It’s not some SI who messed it up and didn’t do the job, or maybe internal IT who didn’t do the right thing implementing our products as they should be implemented. We are responsible for it end to end. But our customers need more. And we realized that we need to create a specialized unit that doesn’t inherently look at our products and try to, using for lack of a better word, push our products to the market, but just understand our customers’ needs and be able to execute an end-to-end strategy of digital transformation. Sometimes it’s a point solution on the experience side, sometimes it’s a point solution on the cloud side. But what we actually collected under the Amdocs Studio umbrella were the units which we believe will enable you to create a digital transformation irrespective of Amdocs’ products. So it starts on the experience layer, where we have almost 1,000 professionals on the user experience side who are able to create the best journeys in the world. And we actually serve companies that you wouldn’t consider being Amdocs’ customers. And we really do have a good perspective on what it means to have an amazing user experience irrespective of the industry, because when we engage with whatever brand online, we don’t even have this, oh, this is a telco, this is an airline — we want the best experience. And when we see an experience in one domain, we expect to see it in the other domain, because if that’s the best practice, that’s the best practice. So Amdocs Studio, our mission is to do two things. First of all, to be able to be our customer’s partner in whatever digital transformation, experience, cloud migration journey they want, or data and AI, of course. Secondly, we understood, as a company that deals in one of the most complicated industries — the telecom industry, highly regulated, and also because it has a legacy of decades — IT projects are not just about what they are, they’re always surrounded by a legacy of systems that have to connect. So we are probably one of the few IT vendors in the world that really take on mega challenges. Just imagine the feat of the migrations that we had to make in order to connect — take into consideration Vodafone Germany, again a collection of acquisitions Vodafone made: legacy wireline, cable, wireless, and now you have to make one company, one information system. So that could be relevant for other industries as well. Now, penetrating other industries is obviously something very challenging, and we’re beginning our journey in industries beyond telecom, but I think that’s your ticket to also serving other customers beyond telecommunication companies. We really have amazing global experience dealing with use cases and IT systems of all sorts, from the most legacy to the most advanced ones. And for us, Amdocs Studio is really about that. It’s really understanding that our customers look beyond our product suite. They have their goals, we understand them, we have these capabilities, and we can serve them in whatever journey they want to take.
Oh, that’s fascinating. So it almost feels like a natural evolution for Amdocs to move into Amdocs Studio and the services space, because essentially you’re moving from professional services on your own suite of products to a broader suite, and it gives you a chance to expand beyond the telco industry in a big way as well. Where we are seeing this, Gil, is this movement towards where the lines between products and services are almost blurring, because more and more services are becoming productized, and more and more products need to be driven towards business outcomes and need to almost have a services mindset. And that’s essentially what we call services-as-software, right? Does that resonate with you? How do you think Amdocs Studio or Amdocs plays into that space?
You know, I think the timing couldn’t have been better. The revolution of services-as-software plays right into our capabilities, and I’ll explain why. I mentioned before the unique business model Amdocs has, which is essentially — and again, as our customers see it — the fact that we implement our products, they have one throat to choke, right? No one else is there other than us to take the responsibility for implementing and launching whatever it is that we developed. If you look at classical services companies, they don’t come with this legacy of and capabilities within the R&D units. Amdocs’ legacy is very much R&D focused. We’re a very R&D-focused company. It’s one of the biggest divisions in the company, and we take pride in having developed the best product suites in the space. Now that services are becoming productized, I think that companies such as Amdocs actually have a much better position to lead this space, because we come with the understanding of what it is to develop things in a productized way. So as a product-led services company, versus a classical services company, we have at least a kind of running start, because we have been busy developing all sorts of products and have this rigor and systematic approach, and it’s not something that you build over a year, not even through acquisition. When you are 40 years into building software, developing software, the kind of capabilities and understanding that you have in this domain is far superior to anybody getting into it today. And of course, it’s not about developing apps. We’re working with the world’s largest telecommunication companies and other large institutions, and they require a level of scale and quality and robustness and security, and you name it. And I would say 50% of the project is not even about the software development. It’s about everything around it. It’s how you deploy it, how you secure it, how you integrate it. So now, when services are becoming productized, services-as-software, I think it’s exactly the right time for Amdocs Studio to lead in this domain, because — again, we don’t have to change the story. Our story is that we are responsible for the development of these capabilities, whether in a product way or in a product-services way. So for me, it was kind of an epiphany I had a few months ago, leading into Barcelona, just before this whole domain, sparked by you guys, started to evolve, and the thinking behind it. For me as a CMO, what is our story around this domain? Why Amdocs? And when we looked at it, we realized all of a sudden that it’s exactly up our alley, and we don’t even have to change the story, which is really the cool part. It’s cool because this is who we are. It’s cool because it’s what we do. So, not many times during an industry evolution are you set in the right place at the right time to actually take the lead, right? Especially in a space where people believe that it’s so new that companies like Amdocs, legacy companies, maybe people think it will take them time. No, we are there, we are leading. In fact, when we launched our first AI platform, amAIz, a year ago at Barcelona 24, I think we were probably the first one to have an official announcement about a product. And now the Amdocs Studio folks are busy working on all the different agents, or, as you call them, services-as-software, that will enable our customers to do all sorts of things, and the capabilities are there from the get-go because we are an R&D unit. So it’s great timing. I couldn’t have asked for a better timing.
Yeah, look, I think as we look at it, outside and into Amdocs, you find two kinds of companies. There are companies who are fantastic at people management — services companies are fantastic at people management, talent management — and there are companies, typically software companies, who are fantastic at product management. There are very few companies that I can think of off the top of my head who have both. But before I let you go, tell me personally, what are you most excited about in this industry as you look at the future? You are at the intersection of technology, telco, transformation, so many different things. But given we’re talking about Amdocs Studio, tell us about what you’re excited about in the IT services industry. And also, on the flip side, what keeps you awake at night?
So I think one of the most exciting topics that I’ve been dealing with in the past few months is really about agents and how agents will actually impact our industry. I think the potential is profound, whether it’s on the care side, and obviously in the back office side. I’m not sure how many people realize that managing a telecommunication company is so complex, all the way from the network through the customer experience. Everything that you do is real time. People pick up the phone and talk or go on WhatsApp, TikTok, and whatever. They don’t realize, as they’re walking on the street, that this thing is following them, has to know which antenna to connect to, which plan they’re on, how many gigabytes they consume versus what they have. Everything is real time. And that’s why there are also a lot of things that you have to take care of. Agents will be one of the most disruptive things, in a good way, because we’ll be able to do so many things that humans have to do manually. Now, one of the things that has dawned on me is that agents are now basically, as far as people are concerned, representatives on behalf of the CSP, the telecommunication company, talking to the customer — whether it’s an inquiry relating to their billing, or some other care issue, or maybe technical support. So agents will basically be the front-side support to the customers. Now, who are they? Who are these agents? What’s their personality? Are they nice? Are they cheery? Are they serious? Do they talk formally? Do they talk casually? How much detail do they provide? And that threw us into no less than a rabbit hole of trying to decipher how to actually create an agent which will fit within the brand guidelines to start with, but then will also be able to understand the context of the conversation, meaning what type of inquiry it is. And we discovered, maybe like you guys with services-as-software, we discovered a new domain that we call personality engineering. This domain basically looks at how you design the agent’s interaction with the consumer. Now you’re actually designing a human, because this thing will talk. It might even have a visual representation of some sort, maybe of a human and maybe of some type of cartoon, but it’ll have a visual representation. What do consumers expect? Should it be a male, a female? Should it be cheery, formal? How do you connect it to the brand? So we launched a global research — 14 countries, 7,000 consumers — we interviewed 120 telecom executives, and also from other industries, to try to understand the consumer expectation and the executive expectation. And we came up with a guidebook of how to launch agents. We have amazing insights into that domain. I think personality engineering will be one of the most interesting domains in the future. Definitely as a marketeer, I love it. I even have discussions internally within Amdocs: how will the Amdocs agents look? And I tell you, it’s not an easy conversation. We’re designing humans, we’re designing the people who will interact with our customers. It’s not like a thing that you do as an afterthought. You really have to look into it. So for me, that’s probably one of the most exciting things, and connecting it to Amdocs Studio — this is exactly what we’re set up to do. The Amdocs Studio experience layer, or experience studio, where we are actually coming to our customers and talking to them about the future engagements they have to design for their customers for the different use cases. If agents are front and center in these experiences, they have to really give deep thought to that. And we have not only the tech tools, but also the research insights on how to do it really well, and what to consider. So that part really excites me. And I really look forward to the industry picking it up. It takes time. I think most marketeers don’t even realize it exists. They haven’t digested yet that this is what it means to have an agent in front of a customer. What keeps me up at night is twofold. One is a technology revolution, or evolution, that I’m not clear how it will play out. And mainly that’s around the LEO domain, right? Will these mega players, mainly Tesla and Amazon, in 5, 10 years become global operators? And will their connectivity be able to evolve in a way which will basically make redundant all the terrestrial equipment — so no need for local antennas, everything is served from space? And will that work or not work? And if it does work, how will that impact the telecom industry? I think that’s not just keeping me up at night. Right now they’re playing the collaboration phase, only remote areas. I have to tell you, honestly, I don’t buy that as a strategy. I buy it as a tactic. So it’s really interesting to see how that will play out. And secondly, you mentioned it when you talked about the services company — I think, and this is not just for telecom, this is for every single company in the world, and we are one of those, especially big ones — the agentic and AI revolution will disrupt what it means to be a company, end to end, from small research units all the way up to mega R&D units. Now that we have agents replacing software engineers, we have agents replacing or aiding in writing and video creation and everything and anything, our organizations five years from now need to look completely different. Will we, as Amdocs, and will our customers, be able to go through this transformation? Because if they don’t, obviously we all know what will happen then. So I think the future belongs to those who will adapt. I coined this term, I called it AI fitness. I think today it’s not about just being knowledgeable on one domain or one AI system. You basically have to be super fit, as an organization and as a person, to be able to adapt to anything that comes your way fast, and make sure you implement it. And you also have to have this amazing filter to disregard everything that’s not relevant for you. And it’s a fire hose of things that are coming. So the filter needs to be super smart. And I think that’s the biggest challenge for our industry, but it’s a global challenge for everyone. And that also really keeps me up.
Look, I couldn’t agree more. I think there are so many dots to connect in today’s world. And if you’re not able to connect those dots, you’re going to be struggling both as an individual and as an organization. And what I really liked about this conversation, Gil, is that you’re one person who can connect a lot of different dots together into telling stories which are credible and come from the heart, not just made up, typical marketing stories. So I think it was a fascinating conversation, Gil. I really enjoyed it. I learned so much.
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