Co-sponsored feature: Amdocs 
                                            

                                      
Eitan Gelbaum of Amdocs: By working with Amdocs’
experienced staff from around the world, Canada’s Mobilicity
was able to get into operation in almost zero time 
                                      
                                      
A new model of what could be called “extreme outsourcing” has enabled a new player to make a successful entry to the Canadian mobile market, previously dominated by three well established operators.
Privately-backed Mobilicity won frequency spectrum in a Canadian government auction of frequencies — but the company decided it needed to move very quickly to make an impact on the market.
Outsourcing was the strategy that the company chose — outsourcing of network operations, call centres and CRM, handset logistics and the IT system. The model that Mobilicity chose is very like that of Bharti in India — outsource everything that is possible to outsource. This is Mobilicity’s compelling strategy.
The company keeps only core selling and marketing functions, and outsourced to the strongest vendor in each business area to achieve rapid time to market, cost-benefits, and business and
operational excellence.
One of Mobilicity’s major outsourcing partners is Amdocs. Mobilicity’s billing and operational support systems (BSS and OSS) from Amdocs — as well as third-party sales and enterprise systems — are all under one managed services umbrella with Amdocs Global Strategic Sourcing.
With Amdocs’ help, Mobilicity was providing service only five months after launch. Today the company can activate a customer phone in only five minutes — compared to competitors’ normal 40-minute timeframe.
Other features are fast too: Mobilicity needs to be flexible in its market so it has to be able to make fast changes to its business processes, and therefore to its BSS/OSS. The Amdocs systems have the flexibility to achieve this — and to enable Mobilicity to grow with expanding subscriber volume and product diversity. The managed services engagement with Amdocs will help Mobilicity continue to shape its innovative competitive strategy and lead the market. This strategy has accurately been described as “extreme outsourcing”.
Mobilicity decided to take the best partners from around the world to manage everything aside what it considers to be core to the business — sales and marketing processes. Its standards are high: customers expect their bills to be 100% accurate.
This strategy meant that Mobilicity did not have a learning curve with those parts of their operations the company has outsourced. By working with Amdocs’ experienced staff from around the world, the company was able to get into operation in almost zero time.
Amdocs has 30 years of experience in managed services of the world’s leading communications service providers — and that has enabled Mobilicity a fast time to market. When Mobilicity encounters a problem, people at Amdocs will have encountered something similar before, perhaps many times before, and they will be able to solve it. Amdocs will have been there before.
But it’s not just running the BSS and OSS. Amdocs’ experience has helped Mobilicity build a strategy and constantly innovate their products and service. As a major vendor dedicated to the communications market, Amdocs has a vision of the market and knows the dynamics of the market. Mobilicity is able to leverage this knowledge.
Amdocs executives are sitting at their desks alongside Mobilicity’s staff working on the operator’s strategy, backed up by other Amdocs staff around the world. Through its global delivery model, Amdocs provides 24/7 support for Mobilicity, with teams following the sun so that even in the middle of the night in Canada there is someone on duty to work on immediate challenges.
The Amdocs deployment of its BSS and OSS systems at Mobilicity started early in 2010 and it took less than five months to complete — pretty much a record.
Mobilicity holds licences covering more than half of the Canadian population in 10 of its 13 largest markets, including Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa.
With a focus on simplicity for city-based customers, the operator provides nationwide coverage with unlimited zones to make wireless communications more affordable and easier to use. An innovative approach was fundamental to the founding of Mobilicity and has been key to the success of this lean and efficient service provider.
Mobilicity has built a world-class wireless business based on outsourcing virtually all of its mission-critical functions to partners. “One of the strategic foundations of our business is to concentrate on what we’re good at,” says Dave Dobbin, president and CEO of Mobilicity.
“We believe we are really good at selling and marketing our product, and for everything else, we looked for partners that are the premier experts in those areas. We needed to have a strong presence immediately to make a ‘bang,’ so we teamed up with partners who are really big and really great at what they do.”
Amdocs was key to the project, says Dobbin: “Very rapid time to market, access to a global staff of communications experts, cost-benefits and continued business value over the longer term: these are a few of the benefits of outsourcing to Amdocs.”
Extensive experience and industry knowledge enable Amdocs to help Mobilicity shape its innovative business strategy. “Amdocs services the largest wireless providers in the world and also small providers, and Amdocs has been in the service provider arena for 30 years,” says Dobbin. “Based on their years of experience, Amdocs has ideas for our business that we wouldn’t have thought of on our own. There are other managed services providers with global capabilities, but not with the service provider focus and experience of Amdocs.”
He describes the managed services people at Amdocs as real experts. “Amdocs was the only vendor that answered our RFP without an integrator. When we had questions, Amdocs gave us straight answers.”
Mobilicity was looking for a partner to provide expert support for any system that it put in — not just Amdocs systems, “and that is a very important part of what Amdocs delivers”, says Dobbin. “Amdocs’ managed services provide us with end-to-end support for their own products and also for third-party sales and enterprise systems including financials, content management, ERP, and others.”
When Mobilicity evaluated other vendors, none of them had a managed service organization that was as comprehensive and as deep as Amdocs’, according to Dobbin.
“Amdocs’ IT and system skill sets strengthen our business and provide the right foundation to support a rapidly growing base of satisfied customers.”
Getting to market quickly was vital to Mobilicity as the company made its debut in a highly competitive marketplace. “The biggest challenge of building a business like this is that there is an immense number of moving parts. You need to make sure that all of these moving parts come together at the same time in the right fashion,” says Dobbin said.
“Our entire server infrastructure, all the software, everything was layered on and integrated, all in just five months,” he says. “It can take providers years to put BSS and OSS operations in place, and with Amdocs it was just five months from ‘zero to hero’.”
Now Mobilicity is in operation, requirements are different, but he reports: “Our turn-around times for change, customization and reporting are very fast, which allows us to act very quickly in the marketplace.”
Amdocs’ technical expertise and product reliability helped the team meet the deployment timeline and deliver continued service excellence, he says. “We turned the systems on the first day and everything worked. We did not get even one customer complaint. Since the launch of Mobilicity’s operations, not a single voice or data event has been lost.”
The Mobilicity outsourcing strategy is helping the company maintain its low prices. “When you do a return on investment analysis of business functions, outsourcing makes sense because you get economies of scale from outsource providers that you could not generate on your own,” says Dobbin.
“For example, Amdocs GSS has thousands of employees worldwide, all service provider experts. That’s a depth of experience and expertise that would be cost- and time-prohibitive for me to recruit.”
Beyond bottom-line cost reduction, outsourcing provides added value at the top line, in business outcomes such as time to market and efficiency. “Today, Mobilicity is receiving tangible business benefits from its outsource engagement with Amdocs Managed Services,” says Dobbin.
“Amdocs also adds value to our business on an ongoing basis with suggestions about best practices and functionality that they have deployed elsewhere in the world. This is a great piece of Amdocs value: sharing ideas based on proven experience.”
Looking ahead as Mobilicity grows, Dobbin expects that the relationship with Amdocs will get even stronger. “In the future, as we bring in more systems, more products and services, and more features, having a partner that is responsive and capable becomes increasingly important.”
Dobbin cites plans to add more value to Mobilicity customers’ lives. “We are in an enviable position as a business in that our customers have a device that they carry with them constantly and is virtually indispensable to them. One of our goals at Mobilicity is to make mobile service even more valuable to our customers, and Amdocs’ experience helps us build on that vision.”
Concludes Dobbin: “Amdocs brings real value to the table: unbelievable speed to market, fantastic execution and products that work. That’s an unmatched combination. I’ve heard Mobilicity’s business model called ‘extreme outsourcing’, and it’s definitely extremely successful for us.” GTB 
                                      
Eitan Gelbaum is vice president of marketing and strategy at Amdocs Global Strategic Sourcing Group
www.amdocs.com