Are you talking to me? Social Media at Amdocs – a B2B social media blog

I’ve adapted this from a post I made in our InTouch community just after the InTouch event.  Hope you don’t mind the double dipping.  I plan on posting something with a more Social Media slant to it soon, but here are my initial impressions of Amdocs InTouch 2010:

The one word that keeps popping up in my mind from this InTouch is AIDA. After Zvikka Naggan showed everyone the video of the new Amdocs Intelligent Decision Automation (AIDA, get it) there was genuine applause. The AIDA guys were busy after that.  There wasn’t a minute that went by that I didn’t see them deep in discussion with one of our attendees about the complexities of semantic data models and ontologies. It was really exciting to hear about and see the interest in the eyes of the people at InTouch. I’ll have to get my friend (and InTouch community member) Stephen Krayewski to upload the video for the community.

Transformation and readiness for the data explosion was a big topic of discussion too.  I was struck by the words of the CTO of Vodafone Hungary who has gone through the challenges of billing (actually business) transformation who told the crowd that transformation is hard, and you need clear business KPIs, not just technical SLAs, to see you through. We heard that from a lot of our customer presenters, and I have to figure a lot of them were listening with great interest. Particularly the ones in the room who stood up when Brian Shepherd asked how many in the room have BSS systems that are over 10 years old. Transformation is probably top of mind for them and I hope InTouch helped.

This is my first InTouch, so I don’t have any means of comparison,  but I thought it was great how many customers were willing to share their experiences in their business challenges, and in working with Amdocs, with their colleagues around the world.  It was great to see such a large group of people who, in addition to making their businesses a success, are really looking to  tackle the business and technology challenges ahead in our ever-more connected world. A lot of them joined the InTouch community during the event and I hope that more join us in the coming days, weeks and months so that we can continue the great collaboration between Amdocs, our customers and among themselves we saw in Budapest.