Good afternoon, everybody. Tim Horan, the cloud and communications analyst. Thanks for coming to our fourth annual 5G conference. We have both the head of investor relations and the head CTO and head of strategy from Amdocs. And I think, Anthony have done, and I have done probably seven or eight of these. He does a two-year, and I talk to Anthony quite a bit privately. And Anthony is having an AI presentation this Wednesday, I think, midday?
Yep.
At some point, which will be very, very interesting. So I'm not gonna hammer him too much today with AI questions. I'm only gonna ask him 10. I had 20 AI questions lined up. We'll save them for Wednesday.
We'll do 18.
Thanks a lot for the time, guys.
Thank you for having us!
So my
Thank you.
The title of my coverage is Cloud and Communications, and you guys kind of fit that fit that perfectly. But Anthony, before we get into a lot of details, why don't you describe for investors that maybe don't know the company real well, you know, how do you describe Amdocs and, how do you think about Amdocs, kind of competitive position in the market?
Yeah, sure. So I would describe Amdocs at the end of the day as a customer experience company, but not traditionally as you think of customer experience. Think of customer experience as full stack, from soup to nuts, from all the way when telecommunications customers come in the front door to buy a service, all the way to service provisioning, all the way to monetization, billing, to making sure your network elements gets provisioned. So we're looking at customer experience all through the cycle. We work with, you know, all of the biggest customers globally. We've been in the industry for quite a while, and we're very deep with our customers. And, you know, our kind of model is product-led services.
We invest in R&D very heavily, to build a product set, a platform set that serves our communication customers. At any given time, you know, at last count, we were touching around 2.8-2.9 billion consumers worldwide, which means, you know, 2.8-2.9 billion, in some shape or form, touch an Amdocs system. Whether it be billing or customer care or service assurance, OSS, BSS, some component somewhere. And we don't take this lightly. I mean, we've built software that is mission-critical, carrier grade, and that's what we do and that's where our focus is.
While we're on that 2.8 million consumers worldwide, that
Billion.
Sorry, billion. That is a fascinating stat.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I would think you'd be hard pressed to find too many other companies with that many customers. And I'm sure you've kind of studied that a little bit, but outside the FANGs, that's a pretty amazing stat.
Yeah, yeah, this is also our industry, right? Our communications customers, at the end of the day, if you want an industry that touches the entire world, it's this industry, right? I mean, it doesn't matter if you're emerging countries, developing countries, wherever you are, everyone has either internet service or phone service, if not both, in some shape or form.
And the industry is still growing globally, thank goodness.
Yeah.
And with new products and services. And so, maybe just while we're on the stats, can you talk about how many employees you have and how you kind of, you know, think about the employees, and maybe the same thing on the products, can you describe a little bit more detail of your product suite?
Sure. So we have, give or take, you know, at any given day, 30,000+ employees globally. We have development centers that operate out of India, out of Tel Aviv, out of Manila in the Philippines, Guadalajara in Mexico. I'm based out of Dallas here in the U.S. We have Cyprus. Those are, I would say, our key kind of development delivery centers around the world. And in terms of our product suite, you know, if you are starting up a telecommunication service provider, other than kind of the hardware and the boxes and stuff like that, you can get soup to nuts the software stack from us.
So all the way from coming in the front door, from self-service to an app, to, you know, any type of API to sell stuff, all the way to, self-service, to customer care, to billing, to monetization, to OSS, to network provisioning, to orchestration, billing, collections, AR, things like that. So if you want a telco stack, you know, most people usually talk to us.
Very interesting. So basically, you can basically bring a telephone company in a box, at the end of the day, if customers so choose. And do you have any MVNOs or smaller companies that have just said: "Look, we're outsourcing everything to you guys, and you run the business?
Yeah, look, I mean, I think, you know, someone that kind of went with us from day one, if you remember, I'm not sure how many of your folks will remember, but there was a company called Aio, spelled A-I-O, which ended up turning into Cricket Wireless in AT&T. So that brand, you know, I remember back in the early days, I was very involved with, you know, it was Ralph de la Vega at the time, was just an idea of standing up a standalone brand. And I remember, like, we had, like, 50,000 subscribers or something like that. Like, today, it's millions, right? And, and that's like a full stack of, you know, even some network elements and components as well, that we stood up. And we
I think we stood that up in, like, record time, if my memory serves me correctly, where we came to market and they did everything with us. We worked with them, they launched a brand, and they're, you know, a great brand in the market. And I think, you know, definitely our bigger customers have a mix and match of lots of different things that they've taken us over time as well. So, you know, some of our big customers may have the older system and then take in newer components. But of course, if you're a new MVNO standing up, you know, you can come to Amdocs and take kind of the full new cloud stack.
And when you sell the full new cloud stack, are you selling that like, I would think you price it and manage it very differently than, you know, legacy services, in that, you know, I'll make it up, it's like $5 per customer per month or some number, and we'll basically handle everything for you or, you know, as opposed to on a one-off kind of project-by-project basis?
Yeah, and look, the models, the models vary quite a bit. It's not like, you know, it's not like we have 20,000 customers and we need just one consistent model. Our customers have different needs. So some customers come to us and say, "Hey, like, we'd like you to do a managed services model. So you take it, you build, you transform, you operate it for us, and run it as a managed service for us," and, you know, we will have some discussion, you know, on, on how we charge and how we're gonna charge for them. Not like. I would say it's not very common that it is subscriber sensitive necessarily. So it's more about, you know, we will build the service, we'll operate it for you, and based on capacity and things like this, here's what we'll provide.
And a reason for that, Tim, is if you think about things like, you know, Black Friday, that happens in the US, right? So you have peaks and troughs of, i t's crazy in terms of capacity, right? Like, just on average, to give you an indication, a data center may use 30% capacity year-round. It comes to Black Friday, capacity may jump to 85%. So you have to build this out, you have to create this. Back historically, when we had, you know, on-prem data centers, but of course, in the cloud it's a bit more dynamic and life is a little bit more easier.
So bringing that back again to our model, of course, you know, we can come in and do it on a project basis, but a lot of customers, and this is kind of how we like it as well, we call it a product-led services business with an accountability model. So they'll come to us and say, "Hey, can you run operations for us? Can you run it on the cloud for us? Can you do managed services for us?" And ultimately, that's kind of where we want to end up.
Great backward, backdrop. Can you talk about the four primary areas of growth for the company, or if there's more, let me know, or less, yeah?
Yeah, yeah. And there's a, Clearly, there's a few that we're focused on. Look, 5G was clearly a compelling event that I would say, you know, brought these new capabilities, new speed, new abilities to the industry that we were very, very focused on. But the evolution of 5G, as I think about it, is what I call ubiquitous connectivity, right? And this kind of term to me is, look, I don't care who I am, I don't care where I am, just connect me and give me the best broadband speed possible. So that includes whether it's fiber, whether it's, you know, 5G or you know, standalone, or whether it's, you know, we're starting to see very early days of, you know, 6G discussions and POCs and things like that.
So trying to get the best connectivity delivered is clearly a growth pillar and clearly an area where technology's changing, right? So historically, if you had years of, you know, coax and focus on, you know, copper and DOCSIS and things like that, now with fiber and 5G and standalone, you have these new capabilities you're bringing to bear on the connectivity spectrum that allows us to deliver different things better. I mean, I'm sure you and your customers know this, if you look at some of the Fixed Wireless expansions, you know, some of the fastest growing broadband is the Fixed Wireless guys, right? T-Mobile, Verizon. If you look at the numbers, I mean, I think T-Mobile, last time I checked, was like a double-digit growth in terms of Fixed Wireless. Think about that, right?
That's in a market that has full broadband capacity, fairly saturated, but still for a new service at the right price point, at the right level, there is still an opportunity for a new service to be introduced and be ingested by the market. Which is exciting for us, for the industry, for the market, let alone, you know, 5G use cases. But we think in the future there will be much more. As we move from, y ou know, I look at 6G from a perspective of extending and expanding the footprint of 5G, right? Like 5G was the foray or the entry into it. You know, we'll keep on going into standalone, we'll keep on rolling out eventually.
Of course, you know, people would have slowed down due to the macroeconomic pressure and things like that, but eventually we're gonna get to standalone networks as they have to upgrade data centers and equipment and things like that. And that's where all of the very, very interesting use cases come into play. So, so that is one pillar. Second pillar is around cloud. Of course, every one of our customers have a cloud strategy, is using cloud in some shape. But in terms of how much of their loads they've moved into cloud, it's still, believe it or not, fairly early days, right? No one has moved and shut down every data center and is fully operated on the cloud, but everyone has a strategy. And so of course, we are doubling down on this. We are helping our customers.
You know, we just did an acquisition around Astadia, and you know, you might think, "Well, that's an interesting acquisition for Amdocs." Well, because we have an interest to move legacy mainframe stuff as well to the cloud. Why? Because number one, we can move them to modernized systems. Number two, we want to be part of that ecosystem of helping our customers move and migrate to the cloud, and it's a multi-year journey. So when you talk about like, you know, some of the wholesale systems are like decades old, right? So there's an opportunity to get them out of data centers and move them onto the cloud.
You know, like, I won't mention names or anything like that, but there was one guy that had, like, you know, all Sun SPARC stations sitting around running applications that he had to do something about. So there's still
I bet he did. Yeah.
Yeah. But there's still these opportunities around. So, so this is why, in terms of growth pillars, we think this is a multi-year investment. We're doing key acquisitions to, to get more-
Anthony, while we're on Astadia, so the
Yeah
I guess most of that stuff is COBOL and, I mean, are they using artificial intelligence to rewrite the code, or how do they migrate the code to cloud?
Yeah. So yeah, it's a good question. Great, great question. So it's, it's two things, right? So, so one, there is a group of individuals that have amazing experience of modernizing enterprise applications, right? That's all they've been doing, right? So they're focused on it, and they have experience on it. Number two, they have built a toolset on how to do kind of side-by-side code testing, modernization. And the third angle of it, in addition to the platform that they have to do it. So, so they have these platforms. So when you think of, you know, you can go to ChatGPT and give them, you know, a bit of COBOL code and say, "Hey, like, modernize this, write this in Java," no problem.
But on the other hand, when you take a complicated enterprise application and you're trying to break it down into functions in Java and try to migrate and modernize it, it's not that straightforward, right? So they have built this methodology over, you know, a number of years that helps you accelerate it. But also, the big thing that really interested me when I sat with them was take some of the risk out of that process. So people are most concerned, not about the ability to modernize and move it to the cloud, but am I screwing something up, right? Like, what's the risk in doing this? Because I don't have documentation, I don't know the code for this. Like, is it gonna run the same way I expect it?
They've put in a lot, there's a lot of IP on there to test side by side, do comparison, do audit trails, while modernizing it, which is just as important.
Yeah, good. Great example. Are they using some generative AI to help the process?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
Look, we think we will continue to accelerate it, as it gets better and better, but it's a combination of about five different things, really, that's their secret sauce.
Sure. Yeah, yeah. Well, as analysts, we tend to oversimplify. I'm sure it's unbelievable. Well, you acquired the company because they were the best-
Yeah
In the world at AI. Great, and the third area of growth?
Yeah, the third area of growth is, look, we still think around the network, there is just so much to be done from automation, modernization. I mean, you can have the most seamless, frictionless customer experience you have on the planet, but if you're then handing it over the fence, throwing it over the fence, and there's order fallout and it's not being provisioned and things like that, you lose the ball, right? You have an NPS impact, your services doesn't get delivered. So the modernization and automation of the network is a big pillar for us. So end-to-end service orchestration, for example, is key to us. You know, the acquisition we did around TEOCO, right? Around service assurance. This was the ability to be able to do kind of closed loop.
So we're looking at not just problems that happen, faults that occur, but also performance all at the same time, and feeding that back in so that we can deliver a service that was promised, guess where? On our product catalog right up the front here. So that feedback loop happens all the way through the cycle. That was, like, one piece we didn't have, so that was a strategic acquisition we did because we were like: Hey, we can provision this stuff. We know not to make an order fallout, we know the catalogs are connected, but do we really know that the service gets delivered? Like, how do you do that assurance piece? And so that's why we did that acquisition, to kind of fill that little hole we had there.
So network for us, key pillar, and of course, you know, the other two ones I would say is B2B. If you look at the enterprise segment, you know, we're still averaging 40-odd days in the U.S., right, for a, a provisioning of an enterprise order. We think that time should be matching very close to the digital space, right? Today, in the digital space, you can provision everything and you can do every- you can order a phone today, have it delivered tomorrow morning to your house. Provision, activated, eSIM-enabled, no problem. Right. Now, it may not get to 24 hours, but 44 days is also a little crazy. So we think that this should be cut down, you know, not to months, to weeks for SMB enterprise, and we're working with several customers.
Also, you know, the Microsoft partnership around CPQ, some of their enterprise tools and things like that, to help our customers break down those barriers. So we think B2B should be a nice growth pillar for us for multi years. And the last but not least, kind of underlying all of these things, is the aspect of generative AI to our industry. I mean, our industry has some of the biggest call centers, biggest service delivery in terms of truck rolls and things being done, largest amounts of employees, like if you look at the big guys in terms of the number of employees they have. So we think there is a lot of interesting use cases, that we can bring to bear that can really help our customers accelerate in their journey.
I would say, I don't know if I missed out on anything, Matt, but these are kind of our big pillars that we focus on.
Yep. Well, I guess the only other one would be, and it's all related, is the CX, the customer engagement with Microsoft.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's part-
Yeah
O f Gen AI, really. And, probably since you've announced it, the opportunity has probably tripled, given the Gen AI, improvements-
Yeah
We've seen.
Yeah.
And I guess, but all this, I mean, really, at the end of the day, for the first time ever, though, we can, like, break down a lot of these silos of different products and services and manage it on the cloud. Not to put words in your mouth, but, you know, if you can really integrate this stuff together, to your whole point, from customer care to billing, to provisioning, and then tie that into the network, well, you know, in a lot of ways, this is a brand-new kind of suite of services you didn't really have the capabilities to do a few years ago. Not, not to put words in your mouth.
Yeah, you're right. And we now, with the Microsoft partnership, we even go, like, much earlier, right? All the way. Like, we never did any campaign planning, for example, or the SFA, Salesforce automation tools, for example. We, you know, usually we kinda left that for someone else. Today, we can bring it to the table. So you can do the lead management upfront, delivering it to CPQ around qualified leads, get the inventory from OSS, make sure whatever you're selling is there and can be sold, and make sure it gets provisioned, billed, monetized, and collected, right? So, so these are all of the components that also the Microsoft partnership helps us bring to the table. And you're right, like CX for us is
You know, I was talking to someone just before, and they were trying to explain to me what customer experience was, and 90% of the discussion was customer experience traditionally, like, on an app, and how it deals with people, and like. No, no, no. Like, customer experience, absolutely it should be how you interact with something or an application, but it has to be automated end-to-end until your service gets delivered, right? And it has to be in real time, meaning I click a button, it shouldn't be, you know, come back and check 24 hours later, right? This is not the world we're used to. So customer experience to us means a lot, it's much bigger when we look at it. And you're right, it, it's opened up, you know, a lot more interesting opportunities.
Going back to the network, you know, there is a big push right now around end-to-end service orchestration, especially with the new network topology and what's coming out there. O-RAN, SRAN, right? We're seeing a lot of discussions with customers, and as customers. Even if, like, O-RAN is way down the track, way down, even if O-RAN is like the North Star of what where you would love to live, think of, like, SRAN, right? Like, SRAN, you know, to your listeners, SRAN, think of SRAN as, like, being able to deliver the service, doesn't matter if it's 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, 6G, on kind of the same radio network, right? Instead of having different. Having a single RAN. And then, you know, there's virtual RAN, like virtualizing the RAN. So there's a lot of work to be done there.
Or, now, I put it under the broader umbrella of customer experience, right? And you go, "Well, that doesn't, why is that under CX? Well, that's not really CX." But at the end of the day, if your team order a service and you're not getting it delivered, or you order a network slice, or it's not being provisioned, that's an impact on customer experience. That's an impact on NPS. So that's kinda how we look at the world.
Yeah, no, that's great, great color. So, and I know I ask you this all the time, but, and Matt, maybe you have to answer it, but
Mm
I mean, what do you think about, what's your latest thinking on the total addressable market? And, you know, what percentage has actually been outsourced of the telco industry, you know, globally? And, you know, why in God's name would they do this in-house? Yeah. And I know that's a lot of questions. Yeah.
You want me to take a stab at it? You wanna go, Matt?
Yeah, you start, and I'll fill in.
Yeah. So look, we, we think it's give or take around $60 billion, because we keep on kinda increasing our TAM, you know, adding new services, adding, you know, network capabilities, generative AI. You know, if you look at our gen AI, we have a use case factory around gen AI, which some of the use cases we're working with has nothing to even do with our product set, and we can bring that to bear. So this starts to kind of increase our TAM, which is nice for us. Your second part of the question, look, I think it's cycles. I think every one of our customers goes through these. Like, I, I draw a sine wave sometimes, right? So they go, "Oh, I wanna be Netflix.
Like, I wanna build everything, 'cause I can be Netflix. And then they're like, "Oh, hang on a second. I'm not Netflix. Like, my core business is to deliver ubiquitous connectivity, so let me go focus on that. Let me go to Amdocs and get ABC that Amdocs has already invested money, and use it as a product." A great example of this, by the way, think of C1, our product catalog, right? Used by the top three carriers in the U.S., right? The same platform is used by the top three carriers. They use it in completely different ways. Like, it's, it's amazing. Like, I get surprised, right? 'Cause I'm like, here I am, you know, the CTO, the head of product and engineering, we, we have a vision and we build a product, and you see how they use it.
It's kind of fun in a way, to kinda see how they use it. And I tell my guys, "You know, we are like the Lego store, right? Like, we build the Lego blocks, and our customers decide on how they use it and how they put it to use." And I just think that, going back to the sine waves, yes, you know, sometimes our competition is not even another vendor. Our competition is internal IT, 'cause they go, "Look, we can, we can just build it ourselves. Let us try and build it ourselves." You know, it's gonna be, like, 25 years next year that I've been with Amdocs. I'm telling you, like, it just goes like that, right?
Like, transition with different executives, someone new comes in, they're like: "Hey, let me try this," and then it goes back. So, you know, we understand it, we understand the cycle, and we're in it for the long game, so, we'll continue investing in our products and platforms.
So, I mean, our best guess is maybe 20%-40% has been outsourced to someone like yourself. I mean, I know that's a wide range.
Yeah.
Um
Yeah. It's hard to, like. I haven't even thought about it, but
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's
Okay
I t's hard to really, yeah, it's hard to really put a number, but it's probably somewhere maybe even a little bit lower, I would say, if you include, like, if you're talking about the entire technology, includes IT and network, right? So that's a big swath of stuff. So, you know, there's data centers, there's infrastructure, there's network, there's IT, there's core systems. So technology is still a pretty big segment in our customers.
Well, it's probably a $2 trillion industry globally, I mean, from an end user perspective, or close to it.
Yeah.
You know, so the $60 billion seems a little small versus what you guys can ultimately, you know, do. And, you know, and as we discussed, the cloud and now with AI, it's kind of completely transformed, I think, how management teams at the telcos are looking at their business models, and they clearly want to, I think, accelerate cloud adoption and virtualization, and accelerate AI adoption. If you guys, I think for the first time ever, you gave the stat that 20% of your revenue is cloud-based here a few months ago.
Mm.
And it's growing, you know, double, double digits. Can you just talk about maybe how do you define what is cloud, and, and what, you know, what that product offering is, and-
Oh, sure
W hat is kinda unique out there?
Yeah. It's so, it's made up of a couple of things, right? So on, from one aspect, if you're taking our new stack, our customers are running it on the cloud, right? Very rarely, there may be, like, one or two customers, regionally based, because there's no AWS data center or Azure data center, that they may have to run it on-prem. But other than that, generally, when our customers take our new CS stack, they're running it on the cloud, right? Our new stuff. In addition to that, you know, in the last several years, we've also launched several platforms like eSIM and MarketONE, and, you know, our digital brand that Melon is running on, for example. Like, our digital brand suite, Melon, it's fully SaaS, fully on the cloud, running on AWS.
Like, it's never gonna run on a data center prem anymore, right?
Yeah.
eSIM platform is, you know, Microsoft Azure, it's never gonna run on a data center on-prem. So, so it's a combination of, you know, the new stuff we build, it's a combination of our platforms and SaaS platforms that we deliver, and it's a combination of, you know, running our, like, our cloud-managed services business. So that's where we think, you know, like you said, I think we have an opportunity, not just in the traditional areas we played with, but also with some of the assets we've acquired, you know, in the periphery. Like when we're moving, for example, some of the mainframe stuff that isn't even Amdocs stuff, that we're helping it move it to the cloud, for example.
Very good, very good. And can you talk about, you know, the cloud, broadly speaking, the software that you developed for that and the products that you developed that, I mean, how fungible are they working for one telco versus another? You know, how easy is it or not to transfer it? And so that the industry can get more efficient and leverage cloud, leverage hardware, and then leverage
Yeah
M ore importantly, the software, right? I mean, that's kind of the Holy Grail.
Yeah.
If you build a software product that can be used by 50 different customers, it's a lot better than building one for each customer.
Yeah, yeah. Look, clearly, when we invest in R&D, our vision is to have a product that is a super set of capabilities, right? So to a certain extent. Why do I say to a certain extent? Because at the end of the day, you are not dealing with 20,000 different customers, right? Like, you're dealing with, you know, a couple of hundred key customers, and maybe even less than that, making 75% of the revenue in the industry. So there are some very specific requirements, and you know, you would laugh if I share some of the details of it, but there are some very specific requirements that customers have on their systems and the way they operate. It could be related to revenue recognition, it could be related to simple things such as early termination fees, right?
That are very, very specific to a region or the way they operate, and that's just the way they do things, and they're never gonna change. So, so there are components that are still very individual and will continue to be. And like I said, like our catalog, the example I gave before
Yeah
T his is like, you know, 70%, 75%, I would say, is commonality, right? But then the 25% that's on top, that our customers do, are like: "Wow!" Like, "This is crazy!" It's amazing, in a good way, right, in a positive way, on how they use it differently and how they integrate it differently, and how they even think about it differently, by the way. Right? So some might use catalog as a commerce catalog, others might use catalog as an enterprise catalog, and it's very related to the business model. I mean, we, quote, unquote, the proverbial we, right? We might sit back and go, "It's a telco. Like, you're doing connectivity, you're selling a phone. Like, what's the problem? Like, standardize it," right?
but the way they think about things and the way they do things is not as aligned as you think. Let's put it that way.
I can imagine. So, I was just joking about the AI. Wednesday at 11:00 A.M., you're gonna spend an hour going through it in a lot more detail, but can you just give us a, you know, a high-level pitch of why AI
Sure
is important to you guys, and maybe, you know, why you're better positioned than others to take advantage of it?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I would even maybe start from a little anecdote, right? You had Jensen, the NVIDIA CEO, and you had Satya, the Microsoft CEO, at Ignite the other day. Oh, did we lose Tim?
I'm right here.
Back.
Oh, you're back. Okay.
You won't, you won't lose me.
Okay. You know, the other day during Ignite, the two of them were on stage, right? And they had a slide in the background. Some of you might have seen the slide. There was four logos on the slide. There was the NVIDIA logo and the Microsoft logo, of course, and there was Amdocs, and there was SAP, right? And so you, you like, you go: Okay, like, why is, you know, two CEOs of, trillion-dollar companies here having the logo of Amdocs behind them while they're talking about generative AI? From a, from a macro perspective, our industry sits on an amazing, crazy, humongous set of data that, you know, Google would love to have but will never have.
On the flip side, the amount of operations, the amount of people, the amount of things you need to do to get stuff provisioned and working is crazy. So when you think of generative AI, the way we think of it is, look, we're not—we are, in Amdocs, are not building the next LLM or the next foundational model, right? But we are the ones that believe that we are best positioned to verticalize generative AI in the telecommunication space, and that verticalization is split into two parts. The first part is all of our products, starting at the end of this month, is gonna roll out with generative AI capabilities. So if you're using Catalog, for example, you do not have to know how to use the product anymore. You don't have to be trained for two weeks. You don't have to know about 5G.
You can just come in there and say, "Hey, I wanna build a 5G plan that is targeting millennials in the region of Dallas County," right? And it will - it could use third-party data, it will use the current inventory, and it will give you a sample of 4 different 5G packages that you could then pick on and customize and tailor. Not only that, it will tell you, If you pick one, it'll tell you, "Oh, you do have a similar plan like this. You may wanna look at that," right? By the way, which, believe it or not, is a big problem with our telcos, creating plans that they already have and making, you know, a lot of work for themselves to maintain it. So these types of capabilities are rolling out.
This is the first pillar in CPQ, in Catalog, in our billing, in our monetization. The second pillar is what we call the use case factory. The use case factory is we have, like, a set of what we call, like, 40 golden use cases, where we come to the customers and, like, you know. Us, in the last couple of weeks, I've sat with some of our biggest customers, and the discussion goes something like this. Like, I would say: "Hey, like, tell me what your biggest benefit would be, an area of cost that you have today, that if you can cut 10%, it would be amazing," right? And then we'd have a discussion. Of course, it would either be somewhere in the call center, it would be in truck roll, something like that, right?
And we would go and tackle a problem like that. Not just help them solve it, but help them orchestrate it, help them deliver it, and help them incorporate the result, right? So it's not like someone just has to type here on, you know, ChatGPT and, you know, get an answer. This is, like, carrier grade. And why is it carrier grade? Our Amaiz platform, we spent a lot of time, effort, and money incorporating the Telco Taxonomy into it, right? So we took the Telco Taxonomy, and we said, everything we know from all the way from. Think of it as, like, all of our knowledge from the last 40 years, from our products on how things relate to each other. You know, I was talking about early termination fees before, right?
Think of early termination fees from the perspective of how many different entities impact early termination fees. Believe it or not, it's a couple of hundred. So all of those are programmed into the large language model. So when you ask a question about early termination fees, you know that proration is impacted, you know all sorts of components that make up the result of that. So we believe that the Telco Taxonomy we bring to the table is very key. The other thing is really around trusted AI. So, you know, we serve an industry that is so mission-critical, we serve an industry that is so regulated, that has such high brand equity. So when it comes to things as, you know, fairness, right?
Like, when it comes to things as trust, as privacy, as being, you know, low latency, all of those things need to be taken into account. And, the Amaze framework kind of builds all those things and brings it together. And, we have taken, for example, very, very extensive prompt engineering components and built it together to create a use case factory. So when our customers are building a new use case, you know, we have a low-code, no-code platform that can just drag and drop boxes and connect the use cases together without going. Oh, what do I use for RAG, for, you know, a retrieval augmentation? What, what software do I need to do, or which LLM do I need to connect? And by the way, another big problem, which I'm sure you know, all your listeners are aware of, is cost.
I mean, the cost of these things are, like, crazy, right? Like, if you are always going to a proprietary LLM and always being charged for every query, multiply that by the number of times you're gonna do it and the volumes we have in telco, it's nuts. So, for example, we use a combination of different LLMs. Amaze can flick between the two. We know which questions go to a proprietary one, which ones go to an open source one, which ones has a higher propensity to answer. By the way, the answer is not always generically the same, right? So if you look at the level of accuracy, it's not that every type of answer you get, one LLM is better than the other generically for everything. So, so we choose very carefully which one we go to.
We have all of the pre-trained fine-tuning, p-tuning information, which we've added. We have the Telco Taxonomy, and of course, we have the guardrails around governance, explainability, observability. So if you get a result from us, I have an audit track of where it came from, which data sources it uses, cross-checks against your policies and procedures, instead of going, "Hey," like, "here you go.
So, as a good tee up for Wednesday, Anthony, we will be listening. Maybe one last question, we only have a minute left. Matt, any updated thoughts on some of the legacy spending by some of your customers? You know, at all, can you provide any color what they're telling you about next year?
Yeah, no, I don't think there's any real update since the guidance we provided in early November, Tim. You know, we are seeing some headwinds resulting from some macro pressure across our industry. Macro pressures and industry pressures. And what we're seeing is some of our customers, some of our larger customers for whom we're currently handling modernization programs, they're being more selective, essentially, about where they next spend that next dollar. And to some extent at least, they're prioritizing modernization programs that we're doing with them in order to get ready for 5G in the cloud and so on, over spending incremental dollars on those legacy system enhancements, which tend to be sort of shorter-term, discretionary-type decisions.
So, you know, when we've tried to put our hands around this, we've quantified it at about 3% revenue headwind for the current fiscal year. As a result of that, you know, we're seeing a slower start to the year in terms of the revenue. But we've also had some good win momentum as well in the fourth quarter. And so as some of those newer projects, such as the one with Three UK on the managed services, begin to ramp up, we'll start to see some acceleration, I think, beginning Q3 and continuing into Q4. So a stronger second half, but nothing material to update relative to that initial guidance at this point in time.
Yeah, and just, you know, just in terms of long-term kind of view on it, you know, these cycles are also. Like, some of these legacy systems, by the way, are not disappearing tomorrow, right?
Right.
They have existing business running on it, and so you can put it on a hold, but, you know, like, how long can you put it on a hold for? At a certain stage, you need to do something. Now, what's the something? Either you invest in it or you modernize it, right? Like, pick one.
Well, guys, we're out of time. Looking forward to talking Wednesday, and we'll talk soon.
Good. Thank you.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you. Thanks, Anthony.