Global high-tech and services company Amdocs unveiled its customer experience systems 8 (CES8) solution to telecommunications service providers from the Asia-Pacific region at an "Intouch Business Forum" organised by the company in Singapore last week.
The solution aims to enable better experiences for telecom customers and to reduce the time it takes service providers to launch new products by at least 30 per cent.
The Amdocs CES8 is a convergent billing solution designed to enable service providers to run leaner today while preparing to take a lead in the future connected world, where it's predicted that by 2017 more than 7 trillion devices will require support, bandwidth and new business models.
The CES8 also helps service providers to run leaner while preparing new business models, devices and partnerships, and aiming for better customer experiences.
Amdocs said the CES8 solution also helped service providers evolve and expand quickly by exposing network, IT and data assets to a growing ecosystem of content and developer partners.
It drives personalised and simple customer experiences by concealing the complexities of new applications and devices from end users, all the while ensuring that service providers can run lean and agile operations with advanced technology that lowers costs and improves efficiency.
The company said that by 2020, trillions of devices - most of them not mobile phones - will be connected to the telecommunications networks. This "connected world" will be driven by hyper-growth in demand for ubiquitous connectivity, information anytime, anywhere and smarter connected devices.
Amdocs' Asia-Pacific division president Avi Schechter said the connected world was emerging in the region. The number of iPhone units grew by 474 per cent year on year; there were more than 62 million Facebook users in the region as Asia-Pacific consumers adopted social media as a new way to communicate; and more than 350 trillion text messages were sent in the third quarter of 2009.
Therefore, the Asia-Pacific region offers the biggest opportunities for mobile-industry growth. Amdocs is offering its CES8 solution to help service providers achieve streamlined, agile operations that lower cost structures while enabling them to respond faster to the market, he said.
The firm currently provides its products to 50 different customers in more than 17 Asia-Pacific countries, supporting about 300 million subscribers.
The sales director of Amdocs Billing (Singapore), Dana Peles, said the firm was focused this year on providing its products in emerging and developing markets, and Thailand was one such market with fast growth in telecommunications.
The firm currently has True Corporation as its first customer in Thailand and is looking forward to a second customer - a telecom operator - in the near future.
Amdocs recently conducted a survey called "Connected World 2010: A Survey of Emerging Markets." It explored how the connected world, driven by demand for ubiquitous connectivity and information anytime, anywhere, would affect service providers and the role they played across Southeast Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe.
The survey found that over the next five years the introduction of new services will drive subscriber growth and partnerships between Internet players and device manufacturers will emerge, alongside the evolution of new revenue models.
About 75 per cent of service providers believe the connected world will affect emerging markets in the next five years and 90 per cent of them expect new pricing models to emerge that will fund consumer services and increase customer adoption.