I bumped into Dale Thomas of Amdocs last night at the Nexec event.
If you work directly in the industry, you’ll most probably have come across Amdocs. They’re a billion dollar company ($3.1 billion in revenue if my memory is working from last night’s conversation with Dale) serving the mobile industry.
Dale is President of the European division of Amdocs. Here’s what the Amdocs boiler-plate (on the bottom of their press release) says:
Amdocs is the market leader in customer experience systems innovation; enabling world-leading service providers to deliver an integrated; innovative and intentional customer experienceTM at every point of service. Amdocs provides solutions that deliver customer experience excellence; combining the software; services and expertise to help its customers execute their strategies and achieve service; operational and financial excellence. A global company with revenue of $3.16 billion in fiscal 2008; Amdocs has more than 17,000 employees and serves customers in more than 50 countries around the world. For more information; visit Amdocs at www.amdocs.com.
No whilst that’s a very functional description of the company, it does nothing to really tell me *how* they do this — or more importantly, why. For example, Dale was telling me about how they’re able to deliver substantial savings and cost advantages to the operators using their services — as apposed to operators who’ve deployed an array of different poorly integrated systems. The net result being that when I phone Vodafone (an Amdocs customer), I can talk to ONE person who can, using the Amdocs platform, answer my every requirement. There and then. No messing around. No transfers to other departments (apart from the odd exception), no 5 minute holds and so on.
The real problem I’ve got with the likes of Amdocs is that I don’t know much about them.
I get the press releases and they certainly tell a particular story. But I don’t know much about who they are, what they stand for and how they fundamentally help their operator clients — which in turn, benefits the end consumer.
There’s a lot of companies out there like this. Billion dollar faceless wonders. Known to a tight few in the industry and positively ignored by the rest.
I’d like to see if I can change that. Just speaking with Dale highlighted that I’m missing quite a lot of what’s going on in the industry.
So I’m giving serious thought to setting up the MIR Billion Dollar Club. The concept being to interview the backroom boys — the infrastructure companies who are delivering some super services to the likes of the operators — but that we haven’t actually heard of generally.
How do you react to me bringing you a monthly 10 minute video interview with (for example) the President of Amdocs? Irrelevant for some, I know, but it could be very interesting for quite a lot of the MIR readers. I’d welcome your perspective.