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Building for change
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As IT leaders adjust their short-term priorities in the wake of COVID-19, the big picture remains: the need to modernize systems and position organizations for long-term success. This entails embracing the digital ecosystem while, simultaneously, combatting the difficulties involved in adopting, operating and mastering cloud technologies.
The journey to the cloud is all about transforming the organization’s structure and behavior in preparation for the future. The challenge, however, is that this future is uncertain. No one knows where technology is heading and what will come next. Agility and the ability to react fast and reshape are key to surviving today’s world and building the foundations for tomorrow. For the foreseeable future, service providers will face a hybrid reality: as they adopt cloud technologies and diversify their business and offerings, they still need to manage their ongoing core business. Service providers must maintain their existing IT infrastructure and applications, running side-by-side with cloud-native applications and platforms. While they deploy next-gen 5G networks, they will still continue to maximize their past investments in 3G and 4G backbones. Amdocs, the market-leading provider of mission-critical solutions for the media and communications industry, addresses these challenges with a set of products, technologies and solutions that help service providers accelerate their journey to the cloud.
More than three years ago, we embarked on our own journey to transform ourselves into a digital organization, changing our skills, organization and capabilities. We understood that transforming into a digital organization would be hard, but the fruits rewarding and essential. From the beginning, we knew we needed outside knowledge and different perspectives, so we went to learn from the major Silicon Valley companies. Working closely with Stanford d. school, we adopted design-led thinking methodologies, established a user experience center of excellence and transformed the way we develop software. We shifted our mindset, placing customer centricity and business demands as the centerpiece of our offering. We have adopted 12 factors for app development, adopted microservices and other cloud-native technology and principles, including DevSecOps and SRE, embedding them in our daily practice. An essential part of the journey was our people, retooling and reskilling them. We deliberately recruited Gen Y and Z employees to rejuvenate our workforce and create a unique working environment that leverages existing domain expertise with innovative, fresh thinking and energy. We embraced an open mindset and tooling and shifted the way we work to guilds, sharing knowledge and data. The end result was the creation of modern, modular, cloud-native (and cloud-agnostic) products, open to integrate with the ecosystem.
The Amdocs MS360 platform was born to support our internal transformation into a microservices-based organization that can create and deliver world-class, cloud-native software for multiple cloud platforms. Right from the start, we took a holistic end-to-end approach, spanning the actual creation of a microservice, determining aspects related to security, tracing, logging, monitoring, to maturity and production readiness. MS360 SDK frees the developer from many of the technicalities related to creating and working with microservices, thereby accelerating the time to onboard new developers and increasing the velocity of existing scrum teams. Using the industry ecosystem of best-in-class, open-source-based tools, MS360 supports non-functional application requirements. The platform provides CI/CD capabilities, including governance of microservices maturity and readiness for production. Gradually, we made MS360 the foundation for all our cloud-native microservices-based portfolio.
Following customer demands, Amdocs productized MS360, making it available for their use. If MS360 was previously only about supporting Amdocs development and customer configuration and integration, today we have opened it up to support customers developing their own microservices applications, in co-dev or own-dev modes. In fact, many of our customers have already deployed MS360 worldwide, including at Tier-1 operators in North America, Europe and South-East Asia. MS360 accelerates their cloud and DevOps transformation at scale and is proven to increase software development velocity by between 15%-40%, as well reduce operational cost by up to 20%. Becoming a digital organization is critical to being relevant in today’s world. The journey to embrace the technology, alongside the relevant process changes and workforce reskilling, may be tedious, but it is definitely rewarding. The ability of companies to adopt to new demands and changes in the business environment will be determined by their digital maturity. Investing in the right foundation and automation, being cautious of what you lift and shift, and onboarding the right experts are essential parts of the journey even though we don’t necessarily know what will come next and what will the future bring. So long as you can react quickly to the changes ahead, you will be shaped for success. For further reading, please visit CES20 and Microservices & DevOps. Amdocs is a diamond sponsor of the Digital Transformation World Series. While we can’t meet physically, we’ve reimagined everything you know and love about Digital Transformation World and turned it into a six-week digital event. The Series will offer a varied and engaging content program that will enable our global membership to connect, learn and collaborate, supporting all time zones. Don't miss out on the festival of collaboration! Register today. Note: Communication service providers: you can claim your free pass here.
