Solution Profile

September 2021

Amdocs
Microservices360

Author: Francis Haysom – Principal Analyst, BSS/OSS Strategy

www.appledoreresearch.com
Amdocs Microservices360 - Solution Profile

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Publish date: 9/6/2021

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 Amdocs Microservices360 - Solution Profile

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Amdocs is a provider of customer experience software solutions and services to communications,
entertainment, and media service providers. Amdocs solutions include BSS, OSS, Media &
Entertainment, Digital User Experience, network control, optimization, and network function
virtualization.

Microservices360 (MS360) was originally developed as the core platform to support Amdocs CES20
cloud-native suite. MS360 supports the development of CES20, an umbrella modular suite that
includes all Amdocs BSS products, solutions, and services. Microservices360 has enabled the
modernization of the digital experience DigitalONE, the catalog products CatalogONE, as well as the
charging/billing products RevenueONE. CES20 is now a proven modular, open and integrated
business solution, backed by cloud-native and microservices technology, in contrast to its previous
positioning as a set of monolithic applications.

From its internal experience, Amdocs recognized that the value of Microservices360 was much more
than tools and platform. It provided a methodology to enable CSPs to adopt microservices
architecture and CI/CD deployment. Helping CSPs to become digital software companies.

CSPs have been trying to become software companies for some time, trialing many open-source
tools and using in-house agile delivery. However, the success of these approaches has often been
limited. CI/CD development often remains more a "science project" within CSPs. Traditional delivery
and development practice remain in place, with low levels of innovation and slow yearly and
quarterly releases continuing to be the norm.

Using MS360 Amdocs has put itself in a powerful position to help CSPs migrate from their traditional
development and deployment approaches to one that is cloud-native and agile. As an existing
supplier to CSPs they can enable existing and new customers to bridge the gap between the current
monolithic approaches toward cloud-native approaches. It also supports new types of customer
engagement and services, ones built on trust and partnership.

Amdocs is increasingly seeing demand for this approach from customers. An approach based on
choosing a long-term collaborative partner that can codevelop, and deliver, what is needed rather
than a vendor with a set of pre-defined features. Amdocs is seeking to enable customer choices,
including the re-use of existing legacy system investment. They are aiming to replace the traditional
cumbersome waterfall procurement of telcos with a new dynamic supply chain.

This changed approach will be an important foundation for telcos in their ability to innovate and
monetize their services to others as a platform, covered in Appledore’s recent report, Disaggregation
for Growth - Telco as a Platform.

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Amdocs Microservices360 - Solution Profile

MICROSERVICES360
As the name indicates Microservices360 has been developed to enable ubiquitous use of
microservices within Amdocs. It also aims to allow Amdocs to embrace opensource practices and
create a strong framework for product innovation. Microservices360 provides a unified platform for
microservices development across the company and with customers. Microservices360 is
responsible for managing the operability aspects of the microservices (such as monitoring, security,
logging) - so developers can focus on writing functional services which can run on any
infrastructure. The Amdocs Microservices360 development platform and methodology has been
rolled out to thousands of Amdocs developers worldwide.

Program
Amdocs see microservices as being about software design principles, rather than necessarily service
size. In developing Microservices360 they have worked with cloud native expert consultants and
pioneering companies, such as Contino and Thoughtworks (a leading visionary consultancy for
Microservices), but also RedHat, IBM, and even AWS.

Microservices360 has evolved:

1. Firstly, as a program within the company

2. Then becoming a robust platform, allowing development of Amdocs BSS applications.
3. Finally, becoming a framework for CSPs to develop microservices and innovate their own new
services.
Amdocs state that it took one year to build the program and that getting the structure right has
been critical to the program’s success. The acquisition of Kenzan, a pioneer in microservices, has
been central to this work. Success with microservices has seen a complete change in R&D,
development and delivery principles within Amdocs.

Key challenges in the program were:

• Alignment of all people on a single set of principles when everyone has a distinct view of
what microservices are.

• Building platform with a minimum set of capabilities to enable development teams to work
quickly

MS360 is now providing the technical foundation for the integration of Openet into Amdocs, as well
as providing the cloud native platform on which Openet can innovate in charging, policy and data
management.

Opensource Foundation
Microservices360 has been built using cloud-native best practices and Industry leading open-source
technologies underpinned with key partnerships with technical leaders. The following diagram

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 Amdocs Microservices360 - Solution Profile

outlines Amdocs Microservices360 architecture detailing the inner architecture focused at the
microservices infrastructure management and the outer architecture which provides the customer
interaction services, backend services and DevOps automation framework.
Amdocs Microservices360 platform
Figure 1: Amdocs Microservices360 platform
Carrier-grade CI/CD automation and microservices management

Catalog Commerce price Order capture Promotions Partner mgmt. And more… Amdocs functional microservices
Amdocs single function focused, lightweight, resilient
functional microservices in the
microservices “Inner Architecture”

Microservices360 Chassis decouples functional &

Chassis business logics from resource mgmt. & non-functional
components, brings Multi-cloud portability.

Operability framework CI/CD Pipeline

Automation Operability Framework
“Outer Architecture”
provides an operational envelope for managing &
orchestrating microservices
• Future-ready - ability to easily swap tools
Security API Gateway Central Monitoring Service Central • Reusability, control & resiliency
(A3S,KMS) & Mgmt. Logging & Tracing Discovery Config
• Saves time & mitigates risk for CSPs

Platform as a Service (PaaS )

Third party Platform Lifecycle Container Container Container Multi-cloud Market-leading partner solutions provide
as a Service (PaaS) Automation Management Infrastructure Services OS Support predefined carrier-grade CI/CD environment &
enable lean operations.

Infrastructure as
a Service (IaaS) Designed for any cloud

Information Security Level 2 – Sensitive

2 © 2018 – Proprietary & Confidential Information of Amdocs

Source: Amdocs
The Amdocs architecture is primarily based on opensource components (shown in figure 1). These
are augmented by a number of Amdocs proprietary extensions – subject to be replaced with similar
tools from the opensource community when they will exist.

The target state architecture for all CES20 components is cloud-native, consisting of open interfaces
which enable plug-and-play connectivity and stateless, highly scalable microservices which allow
efficient scaling and deployment across geo-redundant data centers and clouds.

By breaking its existing monolithic OSS and BSS systems into micro-services, individual functions
within the component can be scaled up and down to minimize resource utilization. The stateless
nature of the micro-services allows updated functions to be introduced alongside legacy functions
and then for traffic to be gradually routed to new functions with no need for scheduled maintenance
windows.

Strategic Partnerships
Microservices360 is currently certified in AWS, Azure and the OpenShift environment. However, other
cloud providers can be supported, including Google Cloud Platform (GCP), with whom Amdocs also
has strategic agreements.

Amdocs has a strategic relationship with AWS. CES20 is certified on AWS and is built to the AWS Well
Architected Framework. Amdocs was awarded Best telco solution at Amazon’s 2021 partner awards.

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Amdocs Microservices360 - Solution Profile

Amdocs won for their ability, underpinned by MS360, to provide communications service providers a
safe and rapid path to the cloud, allowing the move from legacy BSS/OSS systems to a leading
microservices-based suite. The Amdocs Customer Experience System (CES) portfolio, allows CSPs to
improve total cost of ownership (TCO), shorten time-to-value, deliver a state-of-the-art customer
experience, introduce new business models, and monetize content and innovative digital, 5G, and
IoT offerings.

Amdocs has a strategic partnership with RedHat leveraging their Openshift platform, within
Microservices360, to allow portability and carrier grade reliability. This portability allows
applications to be built “on premise” and then deployed to cloud infrastructure such as AWS, GCP or
Azure.

Deployment Model
Amdocs note that in adopting an opensource microservices platform they have to be flexible in
allowing a customer to make their own platform choices. For example, Amdocs has chosen
Elasticsearch as its search and analytics foundation but needs to enable a customer to replace this
foundation with a different opensource component such as Splunk, Sysdig or Datadog. To support
this Amdocs has a DevOps charter and reference architecture governance for Microservices360.
Microservices360 provides an abstraction layer for the developer with guidelines for CSP tools.
Amdocs see this capability as a way for the developers to reuse its integrated development
ecosystem.

Amdocs note that one of the key principles of CES20 is that it allows customers to choose specific
solutions/components to add into an existing architecture/implementation. The customer should
not require full transformation to enjoy the new benefits and capabilities that CES20 provides.

Microservices360 is a platform that provides a set of capabilities and services that customers can
pick and choose from according to their business needs, and then use them to continuously iterate
and improve their business operations and customer experiences. This is enabled by the CES20
cloud-native, microservices-based architecture.

Results
By implementing Microservices360 Amdocs has obtained major product benefits. Internally and
externally, Amdocs is seeing a 50% increase in development speed through the introduction of
Microservices360 across 1000s of developers. Three years on, Amdocs is seeing an improvement of
50% in its end-to-end velocity. Customers are also seeing end to end velocity improvements of
between 15% and 40%, depending on the maturity of the customer. Amdocs is also seeing lowered
TCO, with a minimum 15% saving being achieved.

A Changed Product Direction

After its original inception there was a major change of emphasis by Amdocs on Microservices360.
Originally Microservices360 was developed as a platform that differentiated the success of Amdocs
products. It was only about supporting Amdocs development and customer configuration and

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integration. Now, Amdocs have opened up Microservices360 to support customers developing their
own microservices applications. Microservices360 is now a product and being sold directly to
customers and enabling development partnerships between Amdocs and customers, rather than the
traditional customer supplier relationships that characterize telco.

In an earlier report we noted

“Amdocs is noting major gains from implementing Microservices360 platform; including in

current projects with CSPs, some of which are co-developing on the same underlying
platform. They would like to see similar benefits within their whole customer base and are
seeing serious interest in customers implementing microservice based solutions.”

This co-development approach is now center stage. In adopting this approach, Amdocs have
changed their product management approach. They are now seeking to differentiate themselves by
climbing up the customer value chain; building on a core strength of Amdocs, which is its services
and delivery capability. Amdocs is seeking to move from providing tools for its own developers, to
enabling and supporting customers that want to be digital software companies. To compete with
software startups and the webscale players CSPs need help beyond simply software but also
software methodology. This is where Microservices360 comes in. This approach is also seeing a
change in the Amdocs approach to legacy and competitive platforms. Recognizing that “Big bang”
replacements fail or fail to occur, Amdocs is using MS360 to enable customers to better leverage
their legacy assets in cloud native use cases.

Microservices360 is now available in two forms:

• Microservices360 Essentials, which continues to support CES20 products

• Microservices360 Enterprise Edition which supports external development by customers.

New developments in Microservices360

Since our last report, MS360 has not stood still. Areas of development have been:

• Enhanced security with a strong DevSecOps environment and more structure for security and
scanning, and securing personal

• Increased productization of product, from experience with key customers. Providing a more
systematic approach, with an Infrastructure as code envelope, lowering time to deploy

• Increased networking focus with Openet integration.

• Moving beyond day 1 installation focus and considering day 2 ongoing management. As part
of this MS360 has moved from its original imperative Chef/Puppet approach to use a
declarative approach with Terraform.

• Increasing Southbound alignment on Kubernetes platform.

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Amdocs Microservices360 - Solution Profile

• Looking to increasingly climb up the value chain with new Northbound APIs

MICROSERVICES360 – ESSENTIALS
Microservices360 continues to support Digital ONE, RevenueONE and CatalogONE customers who
want the simplicity of integrated products.

Supporting CES20 Roadmap

The complete rearchitecting of a product portfolio as extensive as Amdocs’ into microservices is a
big task. Amdocs has adopted a phased approach to moving to cloud-native initially focusing at
network functions and then moving to customer engagement BSS functions. Amdocs has
implemented a gradual modernization of its BSS portfolio building on top of its legacy and in
parallel to its modernization of its network functions. It has prioritized key parts of the portfolio for
rearchitecting based on what it believes is the rate of change demanded by its customers.

• Amdocs have prioritized the re-design of systems which support business agility (systems of
customer engagement). Here they have moved directly to a “cloud-native” microservices
approach. These applications must be agile and flexible since this is where the industry
believe that most innovation is currently happening. Amdocs "direct move" to microservices
and domain driven design was made relatively simple because of the alignment of the
traditional applications with TMF TAM and TMF OpenAPI specifications.

• Amdocs has adapted existing systems as macro services where operability and cost
optimization are critical (systems of record). Here they have made existing capabilities
capable of deployment on the cloud “cloud enabled”. Here the new platform provides
Amdocs with more IT agility (for example, upgradeability and maintenance) whilst at the
same time not affecting reliability and stability. These will be transformed to a micro-
services platform in the future.

Within the BSS transformation, Amdocs had a phased and prioritized migration of functions to the
microservices platform based on business value and focus on systems of engagement with the
customer. Amdocs initially prioritized systems associated with Experience, Care, Order Capture,
Order Handling and Customer Management.

Release Model
Microservices360 has enabled Amdocs to move to an agile recursive approach to delivery. Amdocs
have adopted a staged model to new feature release:

• An MVS release (Minimum Viable Solution) is first produced.

• Multiple iterations of MTV releases (Minimum Tested Value).

• Final ADM (Application Developer Marketing) release.

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At each of these stages, functionality is released to production, with a customer able to use new
functions much more quickly than in the traditional waterfall release model.

Amdocs states that it is currently achieving two sprints per month, with a core release monthly and
a full release (marketing ready) being achieved every quarter. Amdocs is aiming to be able to define
functionality at the beginning of quarter and have delivery by the end of that quarter.

As part of the microservices approach the Amdocs has adapted its test approach for the needs of
CI/CD and microservices. It retains unit tests to exercise small pieces of software within the
microservice. Built on top of this are:

• Contract tests that verify the interactions at the border of the service.

• Integration tests that verify service interfaces between components, verifying communication
paths and interactions.

• End-to-end tests that test whole system against external requirements and goals.

Customization and Configuration

Microservices360 and the CES20 products are structured for customization and configuration at
three levels:

• A core layer where Amdocs’ own proprietary products sit. This is immutable with no visibility
of code by the CSP in the Essentials edition

o The core layer exposes functional APIs based on the TMForum Open API manifesto.

o The core layer exposes a set of cloud-native non-functional APIs for all products to
enable deployment on different environments.

• A common extension layer, built on the core layer, in which common industry customizations
and templates of best practice can be added to CES20. The CSP has visibility of this code. The
CSP can use APIs to modify the behavior of Amdocs microservices or to extend them with new
microservices. Examples of common extensions are:

o Localization in terms of names and addresses.

o Integration with tax engines.

o Integration with payment systems.

• A CSP specific layer where CSP specific integration and practice can be enabled.

o Customers can extend from fixed extension points with their own separate
microservices.

o This layer effectively provides a BSS SDK.

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o This layer enables large customers, such as AT&T, to extend the product to meet their
very specific innovation requirements. Amdocs note that these innovation
requirements are more often focused at change in experience, rather than changes in
the underlying digital microservice layers.

The use of clearly defined layers and integration points enables the agile CI/CD deployment of
CES20 components, Amdocs best practice as well as CSP development.

MICROSERVICES360 – ENTERPRISE EDITION

Cloud native applications are inherently more complex. Amdocs believes this leads to development
complexity and the use of a huge diversity of technologies. With Microservices360 Enterprise Edition,
Amdocs is attempting to simplify this, reducing the levels of complexity. Giving enterprise level
control and methodology, whilst at the same time enabling development teams to be agile and
creative.

Microservices360 is about doing once for many at scale.

Amdocs, and Appledore agree, believe that the use of opensource by telcos has largely failed. It has
allowed many internal science projects and Proof of Concepts. Open source is not free, and
operators are now discovering this. In the wider business Open source simply has not scaled as it
lacks the ability to scale critical people and to change business processes. With Microservices360
Enterprise Edition Amdocs is seeking to do something about this. Specifically, addressing the
acquisition costs of developers, by making onboarding new developers (particularly existing internal
telco resources) easier:

• Removing repetitive activities and making higher lifetime higher productivity

• Isolating the very different levels of cloud maturity of underlying components.

• Providing enough operations for flexibility and abstracting extreme polyglot nature of
underlying components.

DevOps industry practice is based on three things: Enabling technology, process change and people
skills. Often CSPs have succeeded in adopting the underlying technology but have failed in changing
processes and people to leverage this.

Within Microservices360 enterprise, Amdocs aims to provide a set of ways of working, that can be
adapted to the needs of a CSP, and importantly provide the basis for ongoing improvement within
the CSP. These can be broken into four key area:

• Automated telco best practice

• Templates catalog

• Visualization of release

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• End to end operability features.

Distinct Customer approaches

Amdocs believe its portfolio of MS360 products is an embodiment of TMForum’s Open Digital
Architecture (ODA). Amdocs are seeing two distinct approaches to co-development with customer,
enabled by microservices and an open digital architecture.

• Firstly, where a customer is looking to adapt and modernize their existing BSS and offerings.
Here Amdocs can take the lead, introducing changed development and operational practices,
whilst allowing the customer to leverage its existing capabilities. MS360 is product agnostic
and CNCF based. Any integration point (such as Kubernetes logging, application logging,
applicative data search, monitoring or security integration points) can be reused to integrate
with different 3rd parties or other Telco systems. The customer retains the freedom to
continue to develop and extend what they do, with Amdocs or with other integrators. This
approach triggers more collaboration and is ideal for a big telco with lots of vendors. Even
where the legacy product is not cloud native, MS360 can support the delivery of VM based
classic products.

• The second where existing customers of Amdocs BSS can trace a route to cloud native
services. Here Amdocs can provide an existing customer with cloud native practices that work
and that enable a collaborative approach. MS360 also provides a clear path for ongoing
collaborative evolution of the BSS and services. MS360 enables an existing customer to
clearly see a future where its BSS is no longer a “closed garden” but is open to innovation
using a modern CI/CD delivery pipeline and providing the best business agility and technical
flexibility.

Enterprise Architect Experience

Microservices360 enables an enterprise architect to make infrastructure choices that developers will
consume. The enterprise architect is able to choose valid message broker and databases that
developers can then be factored into the developed microservice. This provides the basis for
“extreme automation”. To do this it provides a set of telco best practices in terms of processes,
compliance, and security

Templates are central to Amdocs’ approach to microservices management in Microservices360

enterprise. Templates allow an enterprise architect, within a customer, to codify requirements from
across the business in terms of enterprise IT, business needs and operational organization
processes. The enterprise architect, within a customer, can create modified Microservices360
templates, based on Amdocs extensive library of industry best practice templates

Developer Experience
With Microservices360 a customer can rapidly onboard a developer and enable them to rapidly to
produce microservices. At the same time Microservices360 also provides enterprise control that

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gives consistency & controls across all developers. Amdocs believe they are finding the right balance
point between enterprise level control and developer enablement.

Focus on doing with developers

Microservices360 is a service led product, with much of the transition to microservices development
and deployment being about changes to people skills and processes, not simply underpinning
technology. Amdocs have identified that it is in the area of process and people skills that most CSPs
are lagging in terms of achieving DevOps best practice. By addressing the need for people skills and
methodology, Amdocs believe they are doing more than an SI with a software stack would achieve.

Microservices360 provides an SDK targeted at developers, with the SDK API enabling the generation
of a microservices. This enables development teams to create (or rebuild) new microservices, based
on the latest templates created by enterprise architects. Using this approach changes in template
are decoupled from development. For example, a NoSQL DB (such as Couchbase) upgrade can be
decoupled from change of the actual database. Subject to constraints set by the Enterprise
Architects, technology can be decided by developer, appropriate for the microservice being
developed.

Microservices360 development is based on the use of microservice templates. Templates are

created by an enterprise architect to reflect business and technical policy. Using templates, a
developer builds and rebuilds microservices.

Deployment Experience
Microservices360 has a mature CI/CD process. Microservices360’s CI/CD environment allows a
variety of microservice deployment scenarios (upgrade and rollback), including:

• Auto upgrade where all microservices are upgraded in one release

• Security patch push fixed, without rebuilding

• Blue Green deployment: multiple sets of microservice snapshots with traffic directed to the
newer build.

• Subdomain in-place update; use of new microservice snapshots for testing new
functionalities

• Rolling upgrade move to traffic

“Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke”

Amdocs emphasize that in many cases microservices that work can continue to operate as is.
Without upgrade. You have to take care not to upgrade simply because you can. Don’t fix it, if it ain’t
broke!

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Management Dashboards
Amdocs have put extreme automation at the heart of Microservices360. Lots of automation provides
process consistency and allows strong management insight with dashboards. Example dashboards
include development process monitoring and Microservice status management.

Open Collaboration
Amdocs is supporting an open collaboration model in Microservices360 Enterprise Edition. In many
ways this is similar to many of the approaches adopted by opensource communities, but within a
closed community, of enterprise edition customers. Open collaborations enable people in CSPs to
contribute to Amdocs core. This is a major change from the previous model where the core was only
visible and changeable by Amdocs internally.

However, Microservices360 is not opensource and only customers with Microservices360 enterprise
have visibility of Microservices360 code.

In adopting an open collaboration model, Amdocs is aiming to improve its go-to-market and the
business agility of its customers. Specifically making it easier to listen to and react to customers’
needs as well as enabling more certification. Amdocs are now adding capabilities driven by users,
including operations from Amdocs managed services.

Network/MANO Level Support

Amdocs currently is choosing to focus Microservices360 on supporting the development of new
BSS/OSS applications. The framework could support an ETSI MANO VNF environment. However,
Amdocs’ current focus is network management and ONAP level systems.

Currently Amdocs believe that the Kubernetes ecosystem, used by Microservices360, is not yet
mature enough to support today’s VNFs. VNF specific requirements still drive choice of network
deployment environment. This limits the benefits of a microservice methodology/platform and
favors the traditional Network Equipment Providers. Today many VNFs remain monolithic, reliant on
traditional C++ development, with semi-static fixed implementations onto low latency infrastructure
like Openstack.

In the future Amdocs could see this VNF environment changing as network functions become
increasingly microservices based, particularly the adoption of CNFs. Today many VNFs are still
monolithic and non-cloud-native in approach. At this point they anticipate an increasing relevance
of the MS360 environment to network function management.

APPLEDORE RESEARCH ANALYSIS

Appledore believe that the positioning of Microservices360 is an important foundation in enabling
CSPs to truly adopt modern software development practice and to innovate with others. Their
approach is well aligned with modern cloud-native software and opensource practice. It
acknowledges that the hard boundaries of what is product, what is services, what is delivered by

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Amdocs Microservices360 - Solution Profile

customer, what is delivered by the product vendor increasingly blur and break down in this modern
environment.

Mapping to Appledore Reference Architecture

Appledore Research has identified a reference architecture and taxonomy that describes the critical
needs and components to support CSP innovation and software enabled networks. This is shown in
the following figure. Central to the taxonomy are four high level process needs that we believe are
critical to supporting lower capital and operational cost for CSPs and to enable innovation both
internally and with partners: Closed loop automation; model driven definition of components;
Continuous improvement processes that seek to optimize the CSP environment and the ability to
readily expose all the capabilities of a CSP to customer and partners. For more on each of these
topics please visit www.appledoreresearch.com.

Figure 2: Appledore Taxonomy and Reference Architecture

Expose! – Customer and Partner interaction Partner

Management
Customer
Management
Portal APIs Identity Security

Optimize! - Optimization Engine Innovate! – Composition and Creation Products

Visual Services
Search Machine Order Experience Charge
Heuristics AI Editor
Algorithms Learning Resources

Continuous Define! - Catalog , Models & Reference Data Model Driven

Load Capacity
Improvement Catalog
Models Models
Metrics Logic Policies Rules Processes Definition

Understand! - Rapid Automated Service Act! - Policy Driven Orchestration

Assurance Real time data Ingest Data management

FM PM Data enrichment Data Analytics Policy Service Network Infrastructure

Management Orchestration Orchestration Orchestration

Record! - Inventory
Historic Inventory Dynamic Inventory Live Topology
Closed Loop
Automation
Implement! - Technology
Physical Data
VNF SDN Cloud Edge VIM
Network Center

Source: Appledore Research

Typically, at this point in a solution profile, we would map a product to this taxonomy. However,
Microservices360 is an enabling platform for all aspects of this taxonomy. By providing a strong and
agile development environment Appledore believe that Amdocs will support the increased software
automation of these processes, which are characterized by siloed manual processes today.

Amdocs is embracing DevOps across the lifecycle process from sandbox to full scale deployment
based on its Microservices360 platform. Appledore believe that Amdocs approach here is in line with
IT best practice and that Amdocs can take a leading position in adoption of this approach in Telco.

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Appledore believe that for innovation success in software enabled networks, much of what has
traditionally been seen as separate systems of BSS, OSS and Networks needs to be merged, with
everything becoming software. Continuing the historical distinctions between these types of
software may ultimately limit the innovation possible in the future. Microservices360 by providing a
common Amdocs platform across BSS and OSS will enable this merger/blurring and increased
innovation across BSS and OSS. Whilst Amdocs is currently not focused at using Microservices360 for
network/MANO level development there is no inherent reason why it could not in the future. By
providing Microservices360 as a common software development platform we believe that Amdocs
can help this blurring and merging of these traditional systems categories.

Appledore however recognize that the reality of most CSPs today is to view software networks as a
continuum of existing physical networks, which need to fit within an existing BSS and OSS
environment. By enabling customers to benefit from a fully functional micro service enabled
platform, whilst enabling continued use of key legacy systems Amdocs is hopefully providing an
evolutionary path for its customers to fully adopt micro service-based innovation. By providing end
to end business processes, that will be familiar to customers, on top of the new microservices
platform this will hopefully bridge the traditional approach to BSS and the possibilities that can be
provided by a fully enabled microservices platform.

Appledore believe MS360 will be an important foundation for telcos in their ability to innovate and
monetize their services to others as a platform, covered in our recent report Disaggregation for
Growth - Telco as a Platform.

SWOT Analysis

Strengths
• Market Leader in Telecom OSS/BSS market with large-scale deployments at top tier CSPs.
Microservices360 builds on Amdocs’ existing leading position in OSS/BSS with a large
installed customer base.

• Strong services and managed services organization that uses Microservices360 and can help
CSPs in their journey to cloud-native software development

• Opening up Microservices360 enterprise edition provides a common foundation for Amdocs

and CSP development, removing many of the impediments to cross organization agile
working. Customer needs can more readily be delivered, without waiting for fixed long-term
product release schedule.

• Amdocs has led the industry in CEM based solutions. Detailed understanding of customer
touch points in the lead to cash process cycle should build trust with CSPs to facilitate
process change improvements and the adoption of microservices approach in CSPs.

• Amdocs has a strategic partnership with AWS which supports the deployment of CES20 on the
public cloud. CES20 products are optimized to run on AWS and allow CSPs confidence to

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select AWS as a public cloud vendor. Amdocs also have strategic partnerships with Microsoft
Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

• Amdocs has a strategic partnership with RedHat and is using OpenShift as the underpinning
for its Microservices360 platform. This enables flexible deployment of Amdocs applications
across different cloud environments.

• CES20 with Microservices360 positions Amdocs as a leader in adoption of microservices and

cloud enabled software in the communications market.

• Microservices360 has built a strong program and methodology across company meaning that
microservice projects are more likely to succeed.

• Microservices360 is well structured with clear customization and integration points for
customers

• Microservices360 is well structured with clear points where customers can choose to replace
key opensource component foundations.

Weaknesses
• Appledore believe that the existing hard boundaries between BSS, OSS and Network will blur
as everything becomes software. Appledore believe this blurring is important in maximizing
automation and innovation from software enabled networks. With early focus on BSS and
OSS Amdocs could miss the opportunity to drive more agile microservices developments in
network software. We welcome the stronger focus on network aspects of BSS with the new
Openet architecture using MS360. This has the potential to be extended further into OSS and
Network Management with Amdocs Actix portfolio, supporting new SON and Open RAN RIC
applications.

• CES20 encompasses solutions based on both Amdocs’ microservices360 platform and on

ONAP opensource. Whilst these are bundled together the exact business and technical tie
between these solutions is currently unclear.

Opportunities
• Microservices360 can enable the evolution of existing BSS applications toward cloud-native
scalable platforms that allow rapid new service innovation and subsequent scaling

• Amdocs if they put the right emphasis can use Microservices360 to coach CSPs in innovating
new services with webscale players and small partners

• Microservices360 enterprise edition can be an enabler for helping CSPs to fully adopt
Microservices and CD/CI delivery methodology.

• Support for multi-vendor environments enables co-development with customers using

Microservices360 platform increasing the adoption of the Amdocs platform.

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 Amdocs Microservices360 - Solution Profile

• Microservices360 is relevant beyond telco and gives Amdocs an ability to diversify its
customers. Enterprise has the same issues in managing and adopting microservices into their
businesses. Amdocs is at the early stage of working with a number of companies in the
finance sector. Amdocs could look to build on this and target further enterprise verticals.

• Enabling telcos to disaggregate and expose their services as a platform for others to
innovate.

Threats
• Non-traditional services may be delivered to customer by third party applications bypassing
or avoiding order engagement with CSP. Potential that much of what constitutes traditional
BSS (DigitalONE and CatalogONE) is bypassed by these services and non CSP vendors.

• CSPs retain traditional software delivery and integration approaches in most of their
activities, meaning that benefits of microservice platform and methodology are not realized

• CSPs remain also-rans in digital software development. Innovation continues to occur

outside CSPs with CSPs becoming increasingly utility providers.

• Continued desire by telcos to minimize perceived risk leads to continuation of walled garden
thinking from telco. The opportunity from third party exposure of telco value is missed and
MS360 becomes a more modern framework for classic BSS.

CUSTOMERS
Amdocs is seeing that the majority of CSPs understand the need for a move to a micro service
architecture. Microservices360 in both editions they believe will allow CSPs to start the micro service
journey and obtain service scale and agility. Amdocs expect several projects, spanning a spectrum of
use cases. Amdocs is already noting distinct geographic distinctions in CSPs approach to micro-
services:

• In North America there are several microservices projects, with operators keen to close the
micro-services gap with Netflix.

• Europe initially took an experimental/first exploration of micro-services approach. However,

this is increasingly changing with companies, like Vodafone, adopting micros-services at the
heart of what they do.

• APAC are focused on public cloud deployment and less on micro- services.

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Amdocs Microservices360 - Solution Profile

Vodafone Germany Case Study

“If organization is not being transformed then nothing changes” Ralf Hellebrand,
Vodafone Germany

Amdocs Microservices360, is providing a cloud-native collaboration platform for product innovation

at Vodafone Germany. It is enabling an integrated and dynamic software supply chain, across
Amdocs, AWS and Vodafone, enabling Vodafone to rapidly create new bundled products with, and
for, third parties, including those that traditionally would have been perceived as OTT. These
products are delivered with high levels of automation, and strong customer experience.

“We work collaboratively on the solution, and that’s really kind of new to the industry we
are working in, and that’s kind of game changing for it” Ralf Hellebrand Vodafone
Germany

This is a common enough story from many telcos. However, it differs in the way and the speed with
which software is delivered and integrated. Vodafone, Amdocs, and AWS are working in partnership
with a common CI/CD framework underpinned by MS360. Telcos have had difficulty in transitioning
to a cloud-native microservices platform. Cloud-native applications are inherently more complex,
and this often leads to development complexity with a huge diversity of technologies. Amdocs has
taken a leading role, in partnership with Vodafone, in enabling a common cloud-native methodology
and creating common cross company processes. The result is a transformation of Vodafone into an
agile organization, working in partnership with Amdocs and AWS.

“We have chosen a partner …. We know we did not have complete solution” Ralf
Hellebrand Vodafone Germany

Telco has an interesting balance to make between the continued need for high degrees of safety and
resilience, and the need to be increasingly innovative. Telcos’ need for safety makes trial-and-error
innovation difficult. Amdocs MS360 has balanced this, giving enterprise-level control and
methodology, whilst at the same time enabling development teams to be agile and creative. Amdocs
aims to provide safety and innovation with ways of working that can be adapted to the needs of a
CSP. The collaborative approach allows all parties to detect issues early and resolve them faster,
using Visualization of release and End to end operability features in Microservices360.

Openet Case Study

Openet was acquired by Amdocs in 2019. MS360 was the natural choice to provide a modernized
scalable platform for Openet’s charging, policy and mediation products. Using MS360 the focus of
Openet has been on:

• Enabling new features to support 5G use cases, such as managing multiple network slices.

• Enabling new revenue opportunities by using all the network data.

• Enabling new applications combining Openet and Amdocs BSS.

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 Amdocs Microservices360 - Solution Profile

For Openet, MS360 has provided a better means of developing network functions, using DevOps,
Cloud native infrastructure, microservices and opensource. It has accelerated the ability to build
network BSS VNF/CNF nonfunctional needs. MS360 has proved its ability to support multi-cloud
infrastructures from the traditional VMWare based cloud infrastructure of IT BSS applications, to the
Openstack infrastructure of network BSS applications

The Openet use of MS360 is still in progress, with launch expected at the end of year. Integration
with Openet is seen as a proof point for MS360 generally. All partners could do this.

Sprint Case Study

MS360 has enabled Sprint to modernize its application portfolio, particularly the e-commerce and
product-catalog functionality. Sprint started with a heavily-siloed architecture, developed over
many years, built around individual channels. They have now moved to a unified, simplified, cloud-
native architecture, with unified operations and customer experience, based on Amdocs’ cloud-
native solutions.

An important goal of the transformation was the ability to continuously launch new offerings that
could proactively respond to customers’ needs. At the same time, they needed to minimize business
risk and operational costs, and to be agile enough to support future business models.

Sprint adopted a joint co-development and co-operations support model, with Amdocs, across the
entire software-development lifecycle. Sprint’s employees were reskilled and retrained to work
within a cloud native MS360 architecture and its DevOps culture. This meant re-engineering their
joint IT and software-development lifecycle best practices, methodologies, processes, tools, and
documentation into common ones. This team is expected to lead the way for any customizations
that are required on top of the core Amdocs offering.

Sprint anticipate reductions of 50% in time-to-market for new services and features using MS360
and CatalogONE. They are also achieving up to 20% savings in TCO, because of their greater
autonomy in software development that MS360 is enabling. Finally, MS360 has enabled Sprint to
achieve a gradual transformation, with minimized business risk and strong business continuity.

Microservices360 Essentials Case Study

As an evolution of their existing product suite all Amdocs customers already use parts of the
solutions that utilize Microservices360 essentials. In a North American Prepaid Wireless Operator
CES20 supported by Microservices360 essentials is working alongside existing legacy Amdocs
applications. Using CES20 a North American Prepaid Wireless Operator is now able to provide on-
device activation of customers sold through third party retailers. This is enabling significant
reduction in calls to call centers and improved customer experience. CES20 and the underlying
microservices has enabled the operator to rapidly introduce this new capability with a Proof of
Concept in about 6 weeks and the system being turned live rapidly afterwards.

In this case study microservices based DigitalONE & CatalogONE has enabled Amdocs to effectively
compete with smaller more agile competitors to win and then successfully deliver innovative

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Amdocs Microservices360 - Solution Profile

solutions. It has allowed Amdocs to change the customer perception of large, lengthy and costly
delivery projects.

Amdocs note that in delivering this solution with microservices they have also been able to innovate
and change the way in which customer engagement occurs. It has allowed them to move from a
traditional telco fixed business flow, where a customer must first authenticate before they use a
system, to a webscale customer engagement where the customer is first presented with offers and
service and authentication only occurs at the end of the transaction.

Amdocs also note several other operators that are making use of capabilities of CES20 and the
microservices360 platform, where the customer is deploying microservices360 and customizing it to
map with their architecture choices.

Microservices360 Enterprise Edition Case Study

A major North American CSP, who had previously used Microservices360 essentials, has now adopted
Microservices360 enterprise. This is to accelerate its ability to become a digital service provider and
emulate the agility and innovation rate of both web scale competition and small innovative
companies. The CSP is also a major user of ONAP today.

Amdocs are seeing increasing amounts of Continuous Integration occurring in CSP development
teams. However, Continuous Deployment is still at the same level as before, with improvement still
in the future. Using Microservices360 the CSP is now getting a CI/CD cadence of 2 weeks with 1-
month delivery.

At the CSP a developer can choose between version of Mongo or Cassandra and then have the
microservice built using that choice. This changes software builds from taking a week, to being
achievable in hours.

The CSP is now an active contributor to the Microservices360 core, through its membership of the
Amdocs Open Collaboration Model.

Microservices360 is also being used to support service level guarantees for the CSP using ONAP.
ONAP by default is provided as a community edition. Microservices360 is enabling Amdocs to
provide enterprise grade support for ONAP to the CSP.

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Insight and analysis for telecom transformation.

@AppledoreVision

Appledore Research
www.appledoreresearch.com

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