"Companies will have to learn how to enable their employees to work from home"

“Amdocs is a company that has been leading the communications sector for 40 years, working with all the major global service providers: AT&T, Vodafone and Singtel, from Asia to South America and Europe, and of course the U.S.,” said Gil Rosen, Amdocs chief marketing office and president and general manager of amdocs:next in his opening remarks at Calcalist's Innovation Week conference.

"We work with media giants like HBO and Warner. Work of such magnitude over so many years, including the creation of dozens of products and the completion of hundreds of projects, demands that we be super innovative, and be super innovative all the time," Rosen continued. "Now it’s true Amdocs has been around for a long time and the focus has possibly moved to younger companies, but we continue to lead innovation in all of our sectors. The companies we work with expect nothing less from us; indeed the reason we have been at the forefront for so long with our partners is that we always reinvent ourselves and create new products."

There’s no magic wand behind innovation

“Amdocs is a global company located in 85 countries with 27,000 employees,” Rosen added. “Creating innovation is a continuous challenge and we meet it. We have a 360-degree approach: there’s no one thing that creates innovation and there’s no magic wand. Amdocs acquires companies all the time, for example we recently purchased Openet, a company in the 5G sector. We create new products and sometimes the ideas come from the teams working on them. Innovation also comes from joint work with our clients. We have internal projects where we allow young developers to ‘go crazy' and develop new things. We have a lab, which I run, called amdocs:next, which develops new products. Innovation is multidimensional, with no one thing you need to do in order to be at the forefront of innovation. You always have to be open to new ideas coming from the outside or even from a specific employee or group of employees, and of course from acquisitions."

Within a week we moved to working from home

According to Rosen, “many Amdocs products were developed internally. The leading platform for the media world’s entire revenue management system was created at Amdocs. We created a system at Amdocs called doxi which is right now being developed with our clients across the globe in dozens of projects.” At the same, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that companies based to such an extent on scientific cooperation still have to combat, like everyone else, Covid-19. Rosen points out that “in the second quarter of the pandemic, Amdocs successfully delivered a record number of projects around the globe, dozens of them. The pace didn’t slow down. Communication service providers had to keep up with the increased pace during Covid-19 otherwise the world would have come to a halt. And Amdocs, as the engine of the communications industry, had to keep up.”

Rosen added that “of course it took Amdocs a week to get used to working from home, but we did it. A couple of months before the Covid-19 outbreak we moved as a company to working from home one day a week. Suddenly Covid-19 appeared, and we moved to working from home five or six days a week. This is not trivial for company with tens of thousands of employees, we managed to do it thanks to communications technology. It’s not just the technology that needs to be innovative, but all also the development methodologies.”

Working with children in the background

"From a health standpoint, Covid-19 is of course, awful, but it also presents an amazing business opportunity. We are living in an era in which things move very quickly. We saw for example that remote work suddenly became the norm. We discovered that 30% of people said they will continue to work from home after Covid-19. This means that communication service providers and businesses will need to learn how to provide their employees the option of working from home while their children are playing games or watching TV at the same time. For precisely this world, we have developed a number of different products, covering security and the network that answer the needs of, for example, university campuses, around bandwidth, computing services and access to the cloud. All this is enabled by a set of products that in the past we saw in terms of the enterprise world only, but now with the business and home worlds uniting, new models and products have been created,” Rosen explained.

“The world understood the importance of communications and innovation,” Rosen added, “made possible by the communications world. What will schools, smart cities, hospitals look like in the future? All these things happened slowly because people were unsure whether or not to adapt. But all these things will be made possible thanks to the communication companies that will provide the infrastructure for them."