CTO blog Office of the CTO blog – Sharing our vision & thoughts on technology, research, innovation & latest trends.

We are entering an era of permanent revolution. The explosive pace of change – which is driven by rapidly-growing technologies and declining prices – has created uncertainty and volatility. Organizations are facing an unprecedented challenge to adapt and the stakes are high: failure means collapse, while success means exponential growth and rapid market-share.

Adding to the confusion, BSS, OSS and network borders are quickly fading as many service providers transition from being network operators to becoming experience providers. This blurring of the traditional lines has elevated the power of an integrated portfolio, which is priceless in terms of supporting service providers’ growth opportunities and cost reduction initiatives.

Please join us at the Harness the Power of the CES Portfolio workshop as part of Amdocs InTouch in Miami to learn about the significant business benefits of an integrated portfolio. The event – which includes a world-renowned strategist, an innovative demo, a customer speaker and the participation of Amdocs Portfolio and Solution management – will take place on Wednesday, May 16, from 1:15-3:30 p.m. (immediately following the Amdocs InTouch Business Forum). This invitation-only, interactive workshop includes lunch and an exciting mix of sessions and speakers.

Highlights include:

• Avishai Sharlin, general manager of Amdocs Portfolio and Solutions Management team, will explain why it is easier to manage multiple products with a portfolio, rather than a bunch of products.
• Wilson Teles Marcolin, IT Director at Claro Brasil, will lead a session devoted to examining the successful implementation of Claro’s Corporate Platform (CPC).
• A discussion led by Yonatan Adiri, a globally recognized entrepreneur leading Better Place’s global strategy, who was recently nominated by the World Economic Forum as one of their 192 Young Global Leaders for 2012. He will speak about how to use strategic processes to achieve lower costs and shorter time to market.
• A session providing insight into the latest support trends, Amdocs’ support technology and innovation, and Amdocs’ support roadmap.

Register today because space is limited! Be sure to choose the Amdocs Portfolio Workshop option when you sign up. For more information, feel free to contact us.

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I am not sure how many of you have come across this, but Amdocs last year acquired a small but very interesting company called Streamezzo, which is focused on building rich media clients. It has a toolkit that allows companies to build rich media clients for mobile devices.

This is key for our customers who would like to build out RichMedia solutions in the Amdocs world.

Check it out on http://www.streamezzo.com

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This week, I was at the annual gartner BPM Conference, and during the key note an interesting observation was made i.e. the the Process Dimension is generally overlooked. Typically organsiations are focused on their silos  functional, product or markets domains, when doing BPM as represented by the diagram below: -

Why do we really care about the process domain in BPM, well this is where we start bringing together people, products and customers. Each organisation typically has 4-12 major proceses that are executed at level 0. The problem is that these processes change quite frequently the way work is done, the order work is done in and they need to be optimized frequently based on for example customer requests. Typically an organisation aquires and integrates a number of COTS packages to fufill these requirements. The packages are great at automating parts of the value, chain what about when things change and break?

This is when BPM comes in and helps organisations bring together and optimise their end-2-end value chain, that is not implemented by a COTS package. This becomes even more challenging, when you consider that a lot of these processes or parts of these are unstructured or done @ runtime. This is where the concept of dynamic BPM comes in, how do we change these processes.

I like the analogy of a GPS, it does not determine @ the time of being coded the best way to get from AtoB, however it does it only when required by the using using graph theory based on conditions like traffic volumes etc.  An interesting observation @ the conference was that unstructured processes are rather like a GPS’s they need all the functionality but processes are defined in a Just In Time manner, what springs to mind is lean.

There are lots of other items to consider, but this was an interesting set of observations @ the Gartner BPM Conference.

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One of the key requirements in SOA is to have a standardised data model in place. In the telecommunications industry, as I am sure you are all aware this is something called the SID defined by the TMForum, of which Amdocs is an active participant.

Amdocs has defined a model called the Portfolio Information Model or PIM,  that Amdocs Portfolio Information Services are based on, these entities and related attributes are all based on SID as much as is reasonable and practical as SID does have some gaps.

The PIM has:-

>     Wide coverage of BSS and OSS arena

>     Consistent and coherent model on top of underlying applications

>     Conformance with TMF SID standard, extends SID including coverage of areas not addressed by SID

>     Model entities are used as payload in SOA operation signatures

Having a common data model is a core foundation for any soa deployment, and is one of the most difficult and challenging tasks to complete.

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In every thing we do we are guided by our core values and principles, this is what we grew up with, this defines how we make decisions. When things change due to a circumstances around us, that may or may not be in our control, it can have profound and uncomfortable impact on ourlives. Consider the story of Who Moved my Cheese (http://www.whomovedmycheese.com/). This story is all about change and how not adapting to change will cause us to miss opportunities.  Change will cause us to question our core-beliefs and principles and may or will cause them to change.

I have been working in the SOA space for a number of years now, in my latest role here at Amdocs it is all about change. Whilst reading on some topics in the area of Agile, ITIL and SOA (http://www.zdnet.com/blog/service-oriented/why-itil-service-management-benefits-from-soa-and-agile-methodologies/5738?tag=mantle_skin;content), I came accross a SOA Manifesto (http://www.soa-manifesto.org/), which really sums up the change that an organisation or a person has to go through when changing paradigms to serivces based architecture. One of the key challenges of SOA is this change, thinking about “strategic business capabilities” as opposed to a set of API’s for a scenario or a process.

Remember the ”good old days” of a large tech company and technology was king, the orders just rolled off the fax machine. At that time technology was king you had the best technology in the market, thats what people bought. A lot of tech-only companies started to see their revenue streams dry up during the recession. Why ?? technology was no longer king, having to prove near-instant ROI and business value became king. This shift put tremendous pressure on the industry to prove the business value of technology, which caused a major profound shift in the industries core beliefs and principals.  No longer was supporting a set of standards as important as the question “What is the business problem you are solving for me, where are you going to save me money?”. That doesn’t mean standards arent import, they are extremely important, but rather they need to be aligned to deliver specific business goals and objectives.

 In SOA we have always had the basic value we of “proving the business value of everything we do”. The SOA manifesto (http://www.soa-manifesto.org), really sums this statement up. The SOA Manefisto is all about change, change in our core values and principles in how we deliver and develop software of the future. In a more on-demand, SaaS strategy these core values and principles continue to hold.

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During the past few weeks, most if not all postings stemming from the 3Par intense bidding war invariably focus exclusively on HP and Dell. In addition to the inevitable speculations who will be the ultimate winner, the discussion generally addresses the implications of 3Par on both company’s Cloud Computing strategy and prospect.

Now that the apparent “testosterone-driven” sumo match has ended on September 2, 2010 with HP the “winner” by paying about $2.7 billion for 3Par, perhaps it is only prudent to step back and reflect by taking a broader perspective. And that’s what Steve Lohr, a contributor of NYT, did precisely on September 3rd. Instead of routine post mortem reporting, Lohr connected the dots in a refreshing post by highlighting one of the more profound and unexpected actionable insights that came from a different perspective, namely IBM.

“I.B.M. has said it looked at 3Par and other companies more than two years ago, when it was building up in the field of clustered storage, an important technology in handling data remotely for so-called cloud computing systems. Instead of 3Par, it bought an Israeli clustered-storage specialist, XIV. I.B.M. will not comment on those estimates, but it does point to the XIV deal as an example of how its research labs are used to inform the company’s merger, acquisition and divestiture strategy… The labs provide strategic “headlights” for the company as a whole. At the end of each year, the lab researchers prepare a global technology outlook, which presents senior management with an assessment and predictions about key technologies over the coming several years.”

Food for thought:

“It is not enough to see in the future, you have to act. If you’re ahead of the game, you can go in and get companies at a good price, before others recognize the value.” – Robert Morris, a vice president of I.B.M. Research

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My name is Annie Shum, VP of Advanced Technology at Amdocs. It is worth noting that my recent decision to join Amdocs happily coincided with why Amdocs decided to hire me: namely, Amdocs’ commitment to innovating Cloud services in the emerging Cloud era.

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Welcome to the official blog of the Office of the CTO at Amdocs. As a group our mandate is to lead the technology strategy &  transformation at Amdocs. As in any industry the telecommunications world is going through an exciting and transformative phase, with new innovations, inventions, devices, standards and business models emerging at a phenomenal pace. To meet the rising challenges of constant change, the Office of the CTO is leading research into, and the implementation of, new computing paradigms, architectural approaches, best practices and disciplines.

As individuals we are passionate about technology and spend our days researching, inventing, innovating and solving complex real-world problems. We are faced with a unique set of challenges on a highly distributed and global scale. Topics such as Agile, Service Oriented Architecture, Cloud Computing, Software-as-a-Service, Personalization, Social Networking, 4G, emerging devices, etc. are all highly topical in our pursuit of solving the highly sophisticated and complex business problems of our customers.

It is our wish for you to join us in this forum as we engage with the wider technology community in conversation about our respective thoughts on the latest technology trends, architectural approaches, standards, cool gadgets and much more.

Theo Beack

Vice President, Research & Cloud Computing

Office of the CTO

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