Hi, everyone. Good morning and a warm welcome to everyone joining today for Amdocs's 2022 analyst and investor update. This is a virtual event, and I'm Matt Smith, Head of Investor Relations for Amdocs. Earlier this week, we reported our full year fiscal 2021 results, and with our management in town together for the first time in a while, we thought now would be a great time to provide a deeper overview and education into our company and to update you on our strategic progress, competitive advantage, and the multi-year growth opportunity we see in front of us by supporting our customers' 5G, cloud, and digital transformation. Before we get going, please refer to our filings, including those risk factors that could cause actual results to differ from those anticipated.
We're also referencing financial measures that are non-GAAP in nature, and you can find the reconciliation of these measures to the most comparable GAAP provisions as an appendix to today's presentation, which has been filed on Form 6-K this morning. Now, to introduce our speakers for the day, we have some familiar faces for you, starting, of course, with Shuky Sheffer, our President and Chief Executive Officer. Shuky will be joined by Tamar Rapaport-Dagim, our joint COO and CFO, and also Anthony Goonetilleke, Group President of Technology and Head of Strategy. Turning to the agenda, Shuky will kick us off by discussing the moves we have made to strengthen the foundations of our business over the last three years, positioning Amdocs for the accelerated growth that we're now beginning to see come through.
We'll then hear from Anthony, who will describe the ways in which Amdocs is powering the exciting possibilities, which we think will result from the major multi-year investment cycles currently playing out in our industry. Anthony will then hand over to Tamar, who will bring the details on how we're operationally built with the right foundation to realize the growth opportunities ahead. Shuky will come back to summarize the investment thesis, after which we'll take questions from our analysts. For those listening on the webcast, we do invite you to submit any questions over the chat feature. With that, it's almost time to turn things over to Shuky. First, please enjoy this short video, which we see as a wonderful depiction of Amdocs's manifesto. Thank you, and we hope you enjoy the next few hours.
We are living through an age of wow moments. There are signs of the incredible digitally driven progress reshaping every aspect of our lives. This amazing era doesn't just happen. It depends on the work of visionary companies who depend on a seamless digital world where advanced networks, clouds, and business systems form the engine that keep us moving forward. At Amdocs, we are empowering our customers' digital transformation. We get to know their businesses better than anyone, building their foundations for the future, partnering with them at every step of their innovation journey to turn their boldest ideas into reality so they can make billions of users feel like VIPs, so they can make the leaps forward that make society tick and industry talk. Behind the experiences that make the world say "Wow," you'll find us helping those who shape the future to make it amazing.
Amdocs, make it amazing.
Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us this Friday morning. In today's event, we are going to share with you a lot of information. We are going to talk about our market-leading technology, about operational excellence, and why we are so excited about the industry and where it's heading to, and why we believe Amdocs is in an inflection point. We have a great competitive position, and we're excited where we are today. If I need you to remember only three things from today's session or to have only three takeaways, they will be that we believe that Amdocs right now is at inflection point for growth opportunities. We have built a very strong foundation with great technology and execution to drive accelerated growth, and therefore, we are very well positioned to deliver double-digit total shareholder return through continuous strategy execution.
Before I continue, I assume most of you on the call are familiar with Amdocs and what we do, but we thought it's a good timing to give an additional intro to Amdocs since we believe that first to the benefit of the people who don't know Amdocs, and definitely because the company has changed so much, and I think we are really having to present like almost a new Amdocs. Amdocs at a glance. We have 28,000 great employees around the world. We are operating in more than 85 countries, and then as you can see later on, our customer reach is all over the globe. We are serving more than 350 customers around the world.
We delivered $4.3 billion revenue in FY 2021, which represents 7% growth year-over-year. 75% of our revenue is recurring, and we've done a major investment in the last year, over a $1 billion investment in our next-gen platform. We have a very unique business model. I'm going to talk in detail about this. All the industry analysts recognize technology as the best in the market, and I think our commitment to sustainability is second to none, and this is something that Tamar will share with you in more detail as we go along during the day. Who are we, and what we do? We are powering the communication service provider to deliver amazing
Customer experiences. We digitize and automate operation, we accelerate migration to the cloud, we create differentiation in the 5G area, which is critical, and I'm going to talk a lot about this because monetization of 5G is in the heart of what we do. We ensure ubiquitous connectivity, and we enable monetization. This is what we do. Later on today, Anthony will share more detail about our technology and why we believe we are the best in delivering this to our customers. This is in principle what we do, and we are playing a major role in the industry mega trends today. We are very proud with our customer list. This is a segment of our customer. You can see that we are operating across the world. These are blue chip customers. We help them to be successful over here.
They help us to be a better company, and we are extremely proud of with this customer set. Starting with North America, I'm sure you guys understand most of the names on this slide, from T-Mobile to AT&T, to Axtel, to Bell, to TELUS and others. Some of these customers are Amdocs customers for decades, like AT&T and T-Mobile. Some of them are recently new customer, like Verizon. But you can see we are powering the leading communications service providers in North America. Another set of customers that we have is what we call multinational. Multinational customers are the ones that are operating in many countries, which obviously requires separate capabilities, and I believe we do.
Some example is Vodafone that are operating in many countries in Europe. The Hutchison 3 Group, which operating both in Europe, in APAC. VEON, which operates in Russia and Eastern Europe. Telefónica, that operates between Latin America and in Europe, and the América Móvil group, that's mainly based across LatAm. We develop very unique skill to support these multinationals, and we are very successful in supporting them. Cable and satellite. I know this is a bit legacy name because most of the cable companies today are definitely not a cable company. They deliver a high-speed broadband and many other things, most of them with our support converge also to mobile.
We are very proud with this customer set, and I think that we are able to, through their journey to expand their offering. Europe have been a growth engine for us in the last several years and continue to be a growth engine for us. Some are not sure, you know, all familiar with the name, but obviously, Orange and, TIM, Telecom Italia, et cetera. If you will compare this list to the customer we had probably several years ago, you can see that added many new customer to this, to our penetration to Europe, and Europe continue to be a growth engine for Amdocs. APAC. If I've shown you this picture probably eight years ago, this picture was almost empty.
In the last several years, we become de facto by far the number one leader in our space in APAC. You can see some of the names. These are mega groups like Singtel, a large customer like Telkomsel, customer in the Philippines like PLDT and Globe, in Indonesia, Malaysia. We are really proud with our success in APAC. As I said, we become de facto by far the market leader. Last but not least, on top of Telefónica that I mentioned, América Móvil, we have a lot of activity with other customer in Latin America. All in all, you can see a very nice spread across the world, which actually reflects our market leadership in this domain. I said before when I talk about.
When I presented Amdocs that we have a very unique business model, and this is really unique, and I will explain. There are many product companies that deliver and develop products. There are system integrators that what they do in life is trying to implement these type of products, and there are also some system integrators to try also to do operation. The only one that develop the products, implement the product and operate the product is Amdocs, which brings a very unique accountability model, which I think our customer like very much and become a unique competitive advantage for Amdocs.
In most cases, what happens in this typical implementation, when something goes wrong, the product guys will say, the product company will say, "The system integrator doesn't know how to implement the product." The system integrator will say, "The product is not working," and pretty much you have zero accountability. Amdocs' unique accountability and business model position us to be the only one that can give an overall accountability for this model. This is why we are proud to say that our success rate in delivering transformation is over 95%, why I believe that the industry standard is probably less than half. I think this has created significant competitive advantage for Amdocs.
I said before, we are the only one that can run this business model. This is why we are the only one that has this unique accountability and competitive advantage. This is a little bit about Amdocs. You're going to get much more details throughout the day, definitely from Anthony, our CTO. When you understand exactly what we do, what our products are and why we believe that we have the best technology in the market. In the last three years, I would say we were pretty busy. We were busy in accelerated R&D. We completely re-platformed, built a new platform, cloud-native platform from the ground up, and invested in cutting-edge technology. We apply constant innovation in what we do. Constant innovation is not just when you deliver products.
Constant innovation is how we do services, how we do operation, automation tools, leveraging all the tools and the best technology in the market, and making sure that everything, in everything we do, by the way, including how we manage our internal staff, our employees, everything that we do, we apply constant innovation. This becomes part of the company DNA. We have a very successful what I call active portfolio management. We are leveraging, obviously, the M&A tool to support our strategy. Some example that you see on the slide right now is we acquired TTS Wireless to support the 5G trend a couple of years ago, when we saw that all our customers are deploying 5G in North America in an accelerated way.
We bought Openet that has 5G-native platform to support 5G charging and policy in digital. Lately, we bought the Sourced Group, which brought us many highly talented consultants in the cloud domain as part of our efforts to support our customer journey to the cloud. We will continue to do so and do M&A as we need to support our strategy. We are a very much employee-centric organization. I believe that our leadership and our employees are second to none. In this domain, we have the best, most dedicated, talented employees. We invested a lot in upskilling them to the new technology. We continue to bring talent from outside.
Culture, having the great employees that we can, making sure that we have the best talent, this is something that we put a lot of focus around ESG. As I mentioned before, Tamar will give more details, but I can tell you that as a company this was always the company DNA, diversity and inclusion. This is part of what we do. I think that with the pandemic going on, we doubled down also on this domain, supporting the communities that we live and work. I think that Amdocs employees are a powerhouse in supporting the communities around the world. This is something that we love.
This is something that is the right thing to do, and it's something that I think our employees really, really want to be part of, and it's accelerating all the time. This is, as I said, we were very busy, as you can see, in the last three years. All of this resulted in accelerated growth. You can see the numbers here on the slide. The company CAGR for 2018, 2019, and 2020 was about 2.4%. This year, as we announced results earlier this week, we finished with accelerated growth of 7%, and we believe that Amdocs today is at inflection point of accelerated growth. We'll continue to talk about this. Fast-forward.
I want to share with you why we are very excited and very optimistic about our future. If you look in the industry, the communication industry is completely redefining the meaning of connectivity for society, and what we mean by that. I think definitely it was emphasized a lot with the pandemic. Traditionally, it was communication. It's all about communication. What happened in the last couple of years? Besides the mega trends that we know are accelerating, moving to digital or digital transformation, deployment of 5G, migrating to the cloud, the pandemic almost created some tectonic shift in certain domains. Things that in normal course of things can take years to accelerate in a couple of years.
I'm not talking just about communication, that all of us and millions of people around the world are working from home. Meaning that rather than using the office VPN, are using the broadband at home, in most cases, competing with their kids. Supporting communication in the best way with high quality to the home, to the office, is something that our industry evolved significantly and actually delivered great results in the last couple of years. This continue to be the backbone of what we do or when we support our customer. Generally speaking, I think that the communication industry is by far the backbone of society. Every device which is offered to market today is connected. Remote health, remote education become part of our life.
Green tech, autonomous transportation, 5G substrate is everything that every technology which is now getting out to the market, it doesn't matter if it's software or application or a device, is built on connectivity. I think that we really like where the industry is going on and the fact that it become what it should be at the backbone of society. You know, I always said, you know, my kids are moving to their own apartment right now. Before they check that there is running water in the apartment, the first thing they are checking if there is broadband. Definitely, I think that the industry reshape itself to where it is today. I think that we actually leveraged the pandemic time to reshape our strategy.
I think that our strategy framework is pretty simple. In digital, we want to modernize CSPs IT to transform their operation. This is critical. They want to do things faster and cheaper and this is where we can support them. All our customers want to move to the cloud. By the way, one cloud journey of one customer is not equal to another cloud journey. We are building a tailored journey to every customer of Amdocs to move to the cloud and leverage a lot from this new technology. This is something that we are doing in the last two, three years. We are going to accelerate next year.
We believe that our capabilities from the product perspective and implementation perspective, and our cloud knowledge together, which will accelerate with the acquisition, obviously, of Sourced Group, put us in a position to support and build a tailored journey to every customer. Enable 5G and then 5G monetization. All of you are reading and know that the industry is spending billions of dollars in deploying 5G. Definitely, this is something that we are supporting the deployment itself. Even more important is the monetization. All our customers are looking for ways to monetize this very big investment.
This is where we are working with them in labs with our R&D to make sure that we can support them with very sophisticated offers and tools that will enable them to be successful in monetizing this huge investment. We talk about real network automation. As you know, the 5G is not just about speed or low latency or network slicing, which definitely delivers a lot of value. 5G is a software-defined network. To build a platform that in real time can provision the services for the moment you as a consumer or enterprise want to connect to a new business, to a new service, until this service is provisioned to the network in a completely automated way, this is what we do in the network automation domain.
Media and partner ecosystem. All of us are aware of this huge ecosystem of partners that our customers today are working with. Everyone building connection. It will be the Netflix of the world or the Spotify of the world. We built a platform that Anthony is going to discuss later on that shows how we can easily connect consumer and enterprise to these different partners in a seamless way that helps actually our customer to monetize these two. We were working a lot on this, and I think that everything that we discussed so far resulted in effect in our actual new strategy that we believe our SAM is expanding. If we look today, we believe that around 2020, our SAM is about $36 billion.
Working with analysts and others, and our own work, obviously, we believe that it will reach $57 billion in 2025. I think even more important is within the SAM, the domains that we mentioned before, like the journey to the cloud, digitization, and 5G, are what we call here on this slide hypergrowth. They are growing faster than the general CAGR of this SAM. We are very happy because what it means is that it continues our strategic focus and builds us as we are, I believe, as a market leader to support these new megatrends give us a rich pipeline for opportunities.
You know, we use a sport term here, early innings, but what we meant is that we believe that these megatrends are just started. If you look at 5G, everyone is deploying 5G. It will takes time until our customer, Anthony, will elaborate on this, will get to what we call 5G standalone. I think there are very, I don't think there are too many places in the world where it is safe, maybe Korea. By the way, when I mentioned APAC before, one of our big customer in APAC is Korea Telecom, which probably was the first country in the world to deploy 5G standalone. We're very happy to support them in this journey.
I think what you should take from this slide that our SAM is expanding, which is important. This is, I think, due to our strategy and our efforts in the last three years. Secondly, that within this SAM, the part that we are supporting, which is, as I mentioned before, the megatrends, are even growing faster within the SAM. As I said, we believe that, as we said, this is the early innings of megatrends. I think that what you heard from me, and you're going to continue to hear from Tamar and from Anthony later on, we believe that we are well-positioned for accelerated growth. We believe that Amdocs right now is at inflection point.
This is the number that we released earlier this week. You see the company grew 7% year-over-year in fiscal 2021. In fiscal 2022, we guided for 8% at the midpoint. I believe that this is inflection point for Amdocs for accelerated growth. You will get more detail during the day, but this, I think, is a result of the very major efforts we've done in the last three years to reach to this position. I believe that by the end of the day you will understand why we are so excited that our market position, the mega-trends, the everything that we do position us for accelerated growth.
I'm going to hand over the rest of the day first to Anthony. Anthony is leading our CTO, and he's Head of our Strategy. I'm sure you will hear from his voice how he's excited about definitely our leading technologies and why and about the industry in general and our position in the industry. Tamar, our CFO and COO, will share with you more information about our operational excellence and financial performance. I'm sure by the end of the day you will get much better feeling why we extremely excited where we are, why we believe Amdocs is well positioned to capture this great opportunity ahead of us, and why we are so confident that we are in the right place.
Ladies and gentlemen, we understand that some of you may have had some issues with the video feed during Shuky's session. If that is the case, please try refreshing your browser and then hit play, which should correct the problem. Thank you.
Thank you, Shuky, and good day, and welcome to an almost sunny New York City. Hopefully today, from what Shuky has shared and what I'm gonna share, and Tamar coming right after me, you'll hear the passion in our voice and the excitement, because this is really a culmination of, you know, the last several years and the effort we've put in to really, as you heard from Shuky, reach this inflection point, executing on our strategy day in and day out. So let's get started here. The first thing, you know, I wanna share with you, our customer base. You know, we are very honored and humbled to serve these customers. These are the world's leading customers, not just in the Americas, but in Europe and Asia-Pacific. These are the people that connect the world.
You know, I don't have to tell you how important connectivity has been to our society lately, but this is the backbone of work, of school, of everything we do today. We're so honored and privileged to serve these customers. You know, we don't take this lightly. With this comes a lot of responsibility, a lot of accountability, and you know, the great thing is, you know, in the last couple of years, we've been expanding our offerings to be able to serve these customers end-to-end, as well as keep adding new logos onto our customer list. What does this actually translate to what Amdocs does? You know, if you are a Marvel fan and you know about Thanos, and he clicked his fingers and there was no Amdocs tomorrow, there'd be 3 billion people who would be impacted.
You know, our systems touch over 3 billion people on an ongoing basis. You know, if you break this down even further, you know, you look at subscriptions, these are not just subscriptions for devices and phones and things like that, but video services, software services, gaming, even some sporting franchises use our subscription services. Now you think about monetization when it comes to your devices and your data, we have over 1.5 billion of these globally that depend on us daily to make sure the monetization is done well, done correctly, and your service keeps continuing. You know, something that you may not realize is over the last several years, we've also expanded our footprint down into the network domain.
Our policy today is leading edge, cloud-native, and with the acquisition of Openet, together with our organic assets, you know, we serve over half a billion customers, you know, serving them on their quality of network, on their policy controls of their network assets. As this moves from 4G to 5G, we're at the heart of it to provide a better experience. Now, I'd like to talk a little bit about why we're excited about this opportunity, because this is not just about us, right? This is about what's happening outside of us, what's happening in our world, what's happening in our industries, and how all of this comes together. The first thing I'd like to highlight here is not something that's new to any of you on the call here. You know, the acceleration of technology.
This has been happening for the last 30 years, and we continue to invest. As Shuky mentioned, we've invested over $1 billion over the last couple of years, you know, replatforming our products and moving them to the cloud, and we're right there at the heart of this. The second one, which we saw really starting the last recession around 2008, where we saw this change in business models. You know, people are very familiar with today, the way you get your food delivered, the way you catch a ride. It's a complete disruption of our business models. Again, this is something on an ongoing basis that needs to be supported. The third thing, which we're really, I would say, kind of being catapulted into, is this change in human behavior, this disruption on how we work.
You know, the best way I can kind of explain this to you is use a very personal example to me, was, you know, right at the beginning of the pandemic, you know, my daughter finished school on a Friday. Come Monday morning, she starts and they're completely online. They went from a physical school on Friday to completely online. Now, if you had to do this before the pandemic, you know, our school would have probably taken a year to prepare, millions of dollars of investment, training teachers, training students, but suddenly over a weekend, this was done. Our industry was at the cornerstone of supporting this. Now you combine all of these, right? You combine the technology acceleration, you combine the business model disruption that's been happening, and you combine this massive demand, this mission-critical demand that's been placed on our industry.
You know, I'm proud to say, being part of this industry, that every one of our customers stepped up to the challenge. You know, think of the data growth, right? Everyone suddenly moving to their houses and working from their houses. Students. Every one of our customers stepped up to the plate, and we're so honored and proud that we were able to support our customers on this journey. You know, one thing we need to remember here, there is a higher demand on experiences, frictionless experiences, seamless experiences. This is what's asked from us day in and day out, and this is just accelerating with the change from how humans behaved during the pandemic. One of the other things I wanted to highlight is not just these aspects coming together and the change in human behavior, but the capital infusion into our industry.
This, by the way, clearly started happening well before the pandemic, but the investment in 5G, you know, we talked to many customers, worldwide on an ongoing basis. I don't think there is one customer that does not have some type of 5G strategy. It's mandatory, right? It's table stakes today. This journey is just starting. I've already spoken about the digital aspects of it, the experience of how you deal with systems on a day-to-day basis. When we think of digital, it's not just having a beautiful app on a phone and being able to access what you do. You know, when you press a click here, you need to make sure it's automated. You need to make sure it happens in real-time. You need to make sure that what you order gets delivered, gets provisioned.
Because at the end of the day, you know, without being too dramatic, it could be people's lives at stake here if connectivity becomes a problem for people. Then we have the capital infusion around the cloud journey. I'll, you know, talk about this a little bit more in a second. The last thing I wanna highlight here is around devices. You know, I meet many of you at various investor and analyst conferences. You know, one of the questions that I get is, "Well, aren't we saturated with devices?" Well, here again, I'd like to just tease it out a little bit by giving you one example of myself. You know, five or six years ago, I have my phone, right? That's my connection with my service provider. I have a SIM card and there's my phone.
You know, fast-forward to today, I have my phone, I have my Apple Watch with an eSIM built into it, I have my iPad that has an eSIM and connectivity, I have my laptop that has a SIM card and connectivity, and my, I have my car that's connected to a mobile share plan. These are, this is one person, myself, that now has a connection to these multiple devices. We haven't even started talking about the plethora of IoT devices that enterprises are starting to use all the way from agritech, as Shuky pointed out, to healthcare. You know, it amazes me to look at the amount of devices that are just coming out of the box connected and powered by 5G. But it's not just 5G, it's technologies like eSIM.
Our eSIM platform has been taking up, you know, huge accolades lately because this is where the industry is moving to, everything connected. One of the things that we're very excited about, obviously, is the potential of 5G. I know many of you have been talking about it, have heard about it, but we're very early on in this journey. Like Shuky said, you know, we're in this phase that we call non-standalone 5G, and we're going into what we call standalone 5G. To put it in layman's terms, it's basically being able to tap into the rich and true potential that 5G delivers. Now, why are we excited about this? Because 5G is not like any of the other Gs. First of all, 5G was the first G that was born in the cloud, that was software-driven.
You know, the moment something is born in the cloud and software-driven, we as Amdocs feels like, you know, we have a key part to play 'cause we deliver mission-critical carrier grade software. The second part of this is we see the adoption of 5G from many enterprises as a technology, right? Around private enterprise networking, as other industries mature and want to be connected in various aspects. We see the element of data being very much coupled with 5G. You talk about AI and the infusion of data and the aggregation of this and how you deliver it and get insights out of it. These are all connected to this ecosystem. You know, we believe we're positioned at the heart to be able to capture this. The second thing I just wanna double-click on here is around cloud.
Now, you know, cloud has been around for a long time. This is not something new, and there's many companies that have moved to the cloud. In the telecommunications sector, I would say, you know, the last several years has been a intentional acceleration of moving to the cloud. This came for several reasons, not because, you know, the industry was behind and didn't believe in it. Remember, the communications industry was some of the guys that actually had their own clouds and maintained it, but they had to make sure they were, again, carrier grade. They delivered things in real time. The bar was very, very high for communication service providers to move to the cloud. This was a cautious journey, making sure the clouds could scale and deliver the value that was expected.
Now, again, every CXO that we meet today has a very intentional cloud strategy. You know, when Shuky took over as CEO, one of his key tenets was, we are going to double down on the cloud. That included investments, included M&A, included certification of our people. You know, today we have over half a dozen of the highest certified cloud professionals in the world. Just to give you some type of comparison here, there are only a couple of hundred in the entire world, and more than half a dozen of them are Amdocs engineers today. We're so proud of it, and we're so honored that, you know, they work on our platforms and our systems. We wanna deliver what we call cloud at scale.
This starts right from the beginning, meeting our customers, talking to them about the strategy, about what they wanna move to the cloud, you know, which system they wanna move to their cloud. All our systems built today are completely cloud native. They are born on the cloud. There is nothing that gets developed in my engineering, in my R&D organization that's not born on the cloud today. You know, different customers are at different points of their journey. Their business cases are different. Some wanna move to the cloud because they need to move out of a data center. Others are running out of end of life on hardware. Others really wanna capitalize the benefits of moving to the cloud. We have crafted a journey for every one of our customers.
You know, we have this term we throw around internally in the company called no customer left behind when it comes to the cloud journey. This is something we believe in. This is something we subscribe in, because, you know, like Shuky said, we have these amazing customer lists, and we wanna make sure we meet them where they are on their journey. You know, there are other aspects when you come to the cloud. Think of security and privacy. You know, when it comes to security for us is by design. When we design our platforms at the beginning, security is an inbuilt parameter, not something you think about afterwards. This goes right throughout the journey.
When we meet our customers from consulting all the way to data migration, you know, no one knows data migration and migrating Communications Service Providers' data at scale like Amdocs. You know, if I count the transformations I have been personally involved in, you know, well over dozens, and I believe that based on our products and services capability, there's no one else that can do this better. When it comes to our platforms, this I believe is another advantage that we bring to the table. We build cloud-native platforms. We run it on the cloud. I don't think there is a platform today that has more than 200 million customers on a single platform. We have a customer like this that has 200 million customers using one of our charging systems today.
Innately, we know the problems that you have to overcome to be able to deliver this, and we bring this knowledge to our customers when they go on their cloud journey. Last but not least, around cloud operations. You know, cloud brings an amazing opportunity to move to a zero touch, autonomous healing, using built-in intelligence to remove the burden of care. These are some of the things that we bring to the table in terms of an A to Z, soup to nuts cloud journey. Next, I'd like to move here towards what we've invested over the last several years to really re-platform and build what we believe is a world-class platform to serve the communications industry.
Again, as Shuky mentioned, we've invested over $1 billion over the last several years to make sure that we capitalize on the benefits of cloud, that we capitalize on the advantages. You know, there is no other industry, if you think of events that happen in our industry, you think of things such as the iPhone launch, in the U.S. here, you think of things such as Black Friday, or even Christmas, you know, these huge spikes in terms of volume and things like that. We've built systems and capabilities that are able to cater for this. When it comes to monetizing a partner ecosystem, I'll touch a little bit later on that. You know, we've built platforms to be able to capture this. Now, the unique thing with Amdocs, we're not a company that says, "Hey, we've got this great catalog.
Why don't you use it?" We also care about how you provision it. We also care about how you care for your customers because we have systems that do this. I'm never gonna throw something over the fence and say, "You worry about it." That's why our customers choose us, because we know some of the things, we know some of the integration, and we care that the journey is fulfilled end to end. Underneath that, we embed this with a rich services portfolio. We call it an IP-driven services portfolio because again, here we invest in building world-class services from autonomous healing to zero touch to fully automated testing cycles. You know, I was speaking to a customer last week and we were talking about multiple versions being released at the same time.
You know, he said, "Anthony, we, you know, we are currently releasing 15 versions at the same time." These are what our systems need to support because you really don't know or really don't understand what will take off, what offer is it, which 5G product is going to take off. You may wanna tweak things a little bit. You may wanna provide different services to different geographies. This is where our products and services really come together to offer a best-in-class unique model that we believe at least that's unparalleled to none. These again are built on the world-class service providers we work with, the engineering teams at Amazon, at Azure, very closely with them. Because, you know, the requirements that come from the industry are not the same requirements as a traditional IT company.
You know, for the last year I've been saying a joke which really became not funny anymore a few weeks ago. You know, I used to say, "You know, if WhatsApp is down for a few hours or Gmail is down for a few hours, you know, people will throw their hands up in the air and say, 'Well, you know, let's just wait till it comes back,' and it's a hassle." But our customers cannot be down for an hour. Again, I don't wanna be dramatic here, but, you know, our customers cannot afford that because if you look at the spectrum of this, is all the way to life-saving community connection that we cannot sacrifice here.
Everything we build is built carrier grade, it's built mission critical on the cloud, and we believe at least that this is something very unique that we provide to the industry. This is just a small promo for our CES platform. I think I covered most of these items here. One of the key things that came out of the last 18 months is what I call frictionless everything. You know, it doesn't matter if it's frictionless commerce, frictionless experience, frictionless delivery. Those points of friction is what we wanna take out. You know, I heard Mike Sievert say the other day, "You know, our job is to remove pain points." This is, you know, just an analogy of that.
Everything we do is look, we know who you are, we know information about you in terms of the service provider, so we wanna use this to help your journey, whether it's when you're calling in, whether you're using a service online, whether you're using a mobile app to serve you better. This is where we're investing very heavily in customer experience. You know, as part of our acquisition strategy, we acquired a company called projekt202 that focused on delivering experience. This is not just about a UI/UX, this is about having sociologists on staff, psychologists on staff, looking at the way that humans interact with the system, because we believe that we are constantly lifting the bar and need to do better because the industry and the world expects this of us.
The last thing here I wanna point out is what we call ubiquitous connectivity. At the end of the day, nobody cares how you connect. 5G is spoken about everywhere. We see the rollout of fiber continuing again because the demand for connectivity has gone up. You know, if you ask my mother about how she connects, she doesn't care. She just wants to be connected. Whether she's in her house, whether she's out on the street, whether she's in the mall, she cares about making sure she's connected. That is a requirement placed on us. As we build our systems, these are some of the core fundamental principles that drive our thinking, that drive our product management, that drive our engineering, in order to deliver the best-in-class we can deliver. This slide is really just a homage to all our employees.
You know, our 28,000 employees worldwide in over 85 countries really just blood, sweat, and tears day in, day out. You know, I've seen people sacrifice their weekends because they care about their customers. The dedication. You know, I'm not just saying this because I'm an Amdocs employee, but really the dedication is unparalleled. You know, we take this journey personally because we know the impact it has on consumers if a service is down, if something doesn't work, if you can't get online. And this is really just a, I would say, a reflection and a thank you of showing a leadership position and being recognized for it in all domains. I could probably have five slides here, but I'm restricted to one. One of the interesting things here is also our angle of how we look at the customer journey.
You know, everything we build is focused on, well, let's look at the customer journey. It's not about, you know, here's one part and let's build a system for this, or here's another part, let's do this, or, you know, we need to provision this, but we look at the entire customer journey. If you look at this and if you map out the communications customer journey, we have our platforms and our services interact in almost every part of the customer journey. Today, if you're a new service provider and if you're standing up a new stack, you could come to Amdocs and you could get soup to nuts, A to Z, in terms of everything. It's not just consumers, right? It's enterprise getting more complex and the demands getting better. You know, we use the example of Jill the plumber, right?
She has six lines, you know, she has a small business, right? How do you serve her? You can't serve her as a consumer because she has a few additional changes that she would like. We think of our systems and how do you cater for this, as opposed to the big enterprises like the Walmarts of the world, the Coca-Colas of the world. They're not exactly the same. This thinking about how you deal with it at the different journey points, how do you take the friction out? This is constantly on our mind as we design and deliver our products and services. One of the things here I wanna just dive down and double-click into here is around our catalog.
You know, I could have picked many examples to pull out, but you know, our catalog has become the cornerstone of 5G. You know, I would hazard a guess that every service provider in the U.S. is using or going to be using our 5G catalog. Every large service provider in the world is either going to be or looking at using our 5G catalog. That's because when we designed it, we designed it with 5G at the heart of it. We designed it with using the partner economy to power products and services. For example, we had a customer that came to us and said, "Hey, we'd like to play around with a pilot that integrates the catalog from Etsy," who I'm sure our American audience is very familiar with, together with our service provider catalog.
We were able to just, within a few hours, just pull in the Etsy catalog, be able to provide it to an offer, to their own, device catalog, and be able to create an offer and launch it. These are some of the demands being placed on the market today. The other thing is agility. You know, it used to be that, you know, weeks and months were okay to launch a new product. You know, it's not okay anymore, right? An amazing experience demands agility, and this is what we are delivering to our customers with this catalog. We have some customers using our catalog as their master catalog for the entire organization. We have some customers using our catalog to launch partner offers.
You know, it's sometimes the most, I would say, the exciting thing for me is to watch our technology and our platform being used for ways we never imagined. You know, our customers are brilliant at this, and I love hearing examples from all over the world. This example here on the right-hand side you see is from Korea. You know, different regions, different areas are starting to use it because it's modular. It gives them the flexibility. We are very excited about this. The second one here, which I've spoken a lot and you've heard Shuky talk about, is around the cloud journey. Now, we have crafted a journey for every one of our customers.
It doesn't matter if you're on one of our older systems, one of our CES 8, 9 or 10 systems, or our brand-new cloud-native system, we have a journey for you. Whether it's our SaaS platform offerings, whether it's our CES stack, we are able to provide a journey for you. You know, it depends on our customers. Some of them are, you know, I would say, dipping their toes and checking the temperature of the water. Others are full scale, you know. You've seen our own customers move not just their IT workloads, but also their network workloads to the cloud. We believe that this journey is still beginning. There are many stats out there that show that this is a multiyear journey as we start to move not just our Amdocs portfolio, but our non-Amdocs portfolio.
With the skill set we've built, we can help them do both. This is where we're positioned to do. The last thing here I wanna double-click is around what we call our MarketONE platform, which is an opportunity for digital growth. Many of our customers partner with many OTT companies such as Netflix, the Spotifys of the world. We've built a SaaS platform running on AWS that everyone can consume, that basically takes all of these OTT partners, integrates them once, and provides them to our customers. Their consumers, their customers can have a choice. Because, you know, if you have kids, you know, my kids have dozens of applications and services that they use. These need to be monetized. These need to be managed and subscribed.
We see a big take-up of our customers around the world benefiting from this platform and launching all sorts of interesting offerings. If you think of 5G and capitalizing on 5G, we'll see more and more of this power of the partner economy being used to drive the revenue growth. Lastly, but not least here, I'd like to touch a little bit on our, you know, Shuky called it continuous innovation. This is really something we subscribe to very highly, something we believe in, you know, something that's in our DNA. We continue to invest. You know, it's not like we invested $1 billion and said, "Okay, we're drawing a line in the sand now. Go off and sell it." We're continuing to invest.
We continue to increase our R&D, invest year on year to make sure that we're capitalizing on these technologies, whether it be providing over 90-plus different payment methods, you know, all from the table stakes of credit cards, all the way to crypto to bifurcated billing. Maybe you wanna pay different parts in different ways. Maybe you have an enterprise phone and a personal phone, and maybe it's a single phone and you wanna split the bill. These are some of the things that we're constantly innovating in. You know, we have many patents that are filed around it. You know, we just filed a patent around what we call omni-monetization, to be able to monetize based on ad-based funding, based on a partner ecosystem.
We continually invest because we know that one of the challenges our customers face is to make sure there's an ROI on the investment in 5G. You know, the investment has already happened and is happening on an ongoing basis, but we're into the monetization phase, and we need to capitalize on this. Around edge compute, you know, you've heard about this. You know, Shuky mentioned about the focus on ESG. You know, this is also something we're looking at. You know, can we reduce the footprint of our technology? Because remember, we're involved in moving and rating and charging so many bits and bytes on a global mega scale. Think about it, right? If you're touching 3 billion consumers worldwide, that's a lot of power globally. We're constantly investing on driving down our footprint, how do we make it more green?
How do we use edge to move workloads off to the edge, so they don't have to constantly be transferred back and forth? This is some of the things we're constantly innovating in. I believe that, you know, these are some of the reasons why our customers choose us. You know, we have a 5G lab that we've opened up in Seattle with several large partners, where we have startups coming in and, you know, we have a great agri-tech startup. You know, one of the other exciting startups I saw in there was, you know, we're monitoring a railyard. You know, we're using edge compute to detect humans that are crossing railway tracks and sending an alert versus, you know, the odd skunk or the odd badger that decides to cross.
Like, why send that 4K image over when you can just detect the humans and only make sure that the needed data is sent over? These are things we are working with partners and working with customers together to make sure we can deliver cutting-edge technology, but not just deliver cutting-edge technology, but deliver in a way that can add value to society and can be monetized. Finally here, I wanna talk about, you know, how we bring all of these together and what we call long-term value creation. Without a doubt, I think you're probably tired of me talking about technology now and our re-platform, and the fact that we've built this thing cloud-native. You know, this is not like the other competitors we see in the industry.
You know, tinkering around the edges and saying, "You know, well, yes, you can run this on the cloud." This is built from the ground up to leverage all the billions of dollars that Microsoft and AWS is investing on their clouds, and this is a cloud native suite that really has got accolades and all our customers are gravitating towards. Our workforce, we invest, and you'll hear Tamar talk about this more. We are very focused on investing in our employees. You know, I know Amdocs is 28,000 employees, but each one of them is very much family to us, and we work in that way. You know, professional growth and investment in career, investment in development is super important. We have thousands of employees now that are cloud certified.
We have local presence and we have various activities to make sure that this talent crunch that's faced globally is something that we're dealing with. We spoke about the best-in-class technology. You know, we're working with some of the leading bodies, whether it's, you know, TIP together with companies like Facebook or 3GPP, setting standards in terms of how 5G is rolled out, or whether it's AWS, Google, or Microsoft, trying to make sure that all of these technologies are built and tailored relevant for our industry. All of these also culminates in our deep, deep expertise in the industry. You know, we understand the pain points. We know what works. We know about the integrations that need to be done in order to get something to work. We're not about short-term relationships. We're not about making a buck here and moving on.
Our customers are here for the long term. We don't lose customers. Our customers join us, and they keep partnering with us for the future, and we believe that every customer journey is an investment in a long-term journey. You know, the other thing here is our unparalleled accountability model. You know, I can't talk about it enough, and I know you heard Shuky talk about it at the beginning, and this is about bringing together both our products and services model to make sure we deliver an experience that is expected and works as designed. Summarizing all of this, if you look at the capital infusion into our industry, if you look at the expansion of the strategic partnerships that you're seeing.
By the way, you know, I know everyone can put out press releases and be excited about it, but you know, sometimes it's important to look what's under a press release. If you look at these announcements of these strategic press releases, they're about adopting our new platform, about adopting our cloud platform, about powering 5G. We're super excited about this and, you know, we can't thank our customers enough for trusting us on this journey. Last but not least, we're developing horizontal competencies that are really adequate for other industries and more than adequate to serve the needs of other industries, whether it's customer experience, whether it's cloud competencies, whether it's autonomous testing and security. These are competencies that we believe can also serve outside of our industry. I hope you're still with me.
I hope you heard a little bit of the passion of why I'm excited and why I'm looking forward to the future, and I'd like to hand it over to Tamar to continue this journey and talk about how we bring these, all these foundational concepts together.
Hi, good to see you all. You've heard Shuky talking about the mega trends and how the company is positioning itself for
Great opportunities we see in the marketplace. You heard Anthony talking about the huge investment we made in technology and the fact we are coming with cutting edge capabilities to serve the market. I want to build on that and talk about the strong foundation we have in our execution that is second to none, the talent we have, talk about the business consistency that is coming with this great customer relationship that lasts for many years. On top of that, the fact we can generate from our customer engagements recurring revenue and ongoing relationship with opportunities to create visibility into the business model. Then how do we drive growth, both from existing customers, from new logos? How do we expand the wallet share within our customer base?
All of that converted eventually, of course, to profits and cash flow, and then how we deploy capital and do this capital allocation in a smart way where we fuel the future growth while return significant cash to our shareholders. Finally, the culture, the unique DNA of the company that makes it so unique in terms of how we go to market and what's the soul of the company. Starting with the strong foundation and building on the execution capabilities of the company, I wanna talk about the global delivery model of Amdocs. We have a great execution around the world that runs hundreds of projects, hundreds of deployment milestones, run mission-critical systems for our customers 24/7. We'll talk both about the projects and the, Managed Services, that we run for our customers later on. I wanna start with the global delivery model.
What does it mean? We have a framework that allows us scalability, access to talent around the world, and the customer proximity that we need for certain skills and certain roles. Starting with the global delivery centers that are in Israel and India, where we have thousands of employees covering all the key competencies of the company. We have regional hubs that serve typically a certain region, for example, Guadalajara, Mexico, that serves the Americas or Manila in Philippines that serves APAC. On top of that, dozens of sites around the world we are serving. To remind you, 85 countries, so dozens of sites around the world serving our customers with skill set that are interacting with the customers on a more daily basis and having that customer intimacy that brings the additional value to our business.
All of that enables us to run a 24-by-7 operation, hundreds of deployment milestones, and do all of that running on one knowledge base, one center of excellence in terms of the competency that is spread through the world. When we're thinking about all of this global delivery model, it all obviously depends on the great talent of Amdocs. When you think about this unique business model that Shuky described before, where we develop the software product and technology, then we deploy it to our customers, and then we run it through IT operations, this creates huge opportunities for our employees to have a very versatile career opportunity and contribute like that to the continuous cycle of knowledge that goes through the company.
If you're an employee, for example, who started in developing products, and couple years later you move to a customer site deploying these products in the customer environment, you understand how operationally it all comes together, what is the real business value this brings to the customers. Coming back then to more of a development role later on, let's say managerial role at this point, definitely you can contribute understanding the customer proximity and the different attributes. We see huge mobility, opportunities for career development for our employees. All of that is on top, of course, of continuous learning that is happening, whether it's technical certifications on the cloud, leadership skills that are built into the opportunity of employees to move up the ladder in managing and leading people, and anything, of course, around the different competencies we have in the company.
This continuous learning opportunity, the ability to have a versatile career is very unique to the employees of Amdocs, and the passion for learning is huge. We see that in different metrics that we can measure. We see that 86% of our employees are proud to work in the company, and it's rising from year to year. We run an organizational health survey run by a leading consulting company that resulted in understanding that we are in the top quartile of companies, and they run this kind of survey for companies around the world, and way above benchmark for TMT and tech companies.
We obviously continuously push for bringing new talent and at the same time retaining the existing employees and giving them opportunities, which results in six years average tenure in the company, bringing that expertise, bringing that experience to play in everything we do. When we are thinking about all of that and how it translates to the record execution, you can see that two different aspects. One of them is how many project deployment milestones we have, and you can see in the graph in the upper right-hand side that we've seen continuous increase in the number of deployments. In fact, in 2021 we broke another record where we deploy on average more than one key project milestone a day. When I say project milestones, it's like consumer mobility for a certain customer, full system end-to-end. Those are meaningful projects.
In fact, even during 2020 when the whole world was under lockdown during the pandemic, we continued to deploy projects to our customers and bring that value. At the same time, we run through IT operations, mission-critical systems to our customers around the world through the managed services model that we provide, which I will describe more about later. We run it in huge volumes, supporting hundreds of millions of subscribers around the world, moving around 30% of these processes to be fully automated, or what is called zero touch in the industry, meaning it's automatically identifying a problem, defining the fix, and putting that fix into production through a self-healing process. Many automation tools that go into that, obviously, and a lot of innovations that goes into that to support thousands of automation flows, etc., etc.
All of that, 24/7 mission-critical systems for top communication service providers in the world, are run by the Amdocs capabilities of this excellent execution. Obviously, we're happy to see that all of that translates to financial results and to the acceleration in revenue and the inflection we've seen in 2021 continuing into 2022 with 8% expected revenue growth on the pro forma basis. We love to see the recurring revenue base that is generating by this long-term relationship and by the continued innovation we bring, the record 12-month backlog that we are coming into 2022 with, robust pipeline of opportunities across the globe, the strong sales momentum that continues, and the multiple growth vectors we believe we have ahead of us.
I want to talk about the business consistency and how this is enabled by the business model that we have and our capabilities, and obviously translated into the performance financially of the stable profitability growing slightly but surely over time. When we look on our revenue base, roughly 75% of our revenue over the years is recurring in nature. I want to talk about the customer life cycle that we have and how this is generating this 75% recurring revenue. We typically start a relationship with a customer through a project, what we call a transformation project, which includes selecting our software products, our technology, deploying it in the customer environment, what we call go live. Then when it's running the customer environment, already serving it, and serving its customers, whether those are consumers or enterprises, this is run through ongoing support and maintenance.
After this successful project, we have an opportunity for an upsell. This upsell can be in the form of selling more of our products, more of our technology. It can be in the form of selling additional incremental services, consulting services, testing services, and it can be, and oftentimes we would like it to be in a form of a Managed Services engagement, which I will talk about in a second. All of that is generating this ongoing support. The longevity of relationship with customers is for many years, we don't have a customer that is leaving us, and we have this upsell opportunity. Now, I want to talk about a new model that is called Managed Transformation, and I will elaborate that in a couple of slides. The Managed Services used to be coming after the project is deployed.
Managed Transformation is a different form of engagement, where we're selling the original deal, both the project and the Managed Services altogether, meaning we are taking the full accountability end to end for deploying the software stack of Amdocs into the customer environment and run it and manage it. We feel this is a great value proposition, kind of the North Star in terms of what we can bring to our customers, as well as leveraging the financial opportunity for Amdocs. I will talk about that in a couple of minutes. Managed Services is a global practice for us. We started in North America many years ago, and we've seen adoption of Managed Services as a model across our global customer base. We already serve several dozens of our customers in Managed Services.
Now, that by itself is great, but if you compare it to the 350 customers that we have, you can understand that the opportunity to continue and expand with Managed Services to more customers is huge. In fact, if you look just on the last 5 years, the number of customers internationally that adopted our Managed Services engagement has increased by more than 50%. Definitely we see that opportunity running on a global level. We've been recognized by leading industry analysts as a leader in that domain. By now, Managed Services represent already 59% of our revenue, and within that, we count in a customer engagement that is involving Managed Services, also the enhanced development, some projects that are happening, et cetera. That has increased since 2016, where it was 52%.
We love to see the renewal rate. It's close to 100%. In fact, it's hard for me to tell even who did not renew, probably some kind of a customer consolidation. We continue to see the evolution of the Managed Services into this Managed Transformation model that I mentioned before. You can see on the right-hand side the evolution of customers that adopted the Managed Transformation model, very key logos, both in the U.S. market as well as internationally.
Just recently in 2021, we had two major announcements, one with T-Mobile in the beginning of the fiscal year, where we have been selected by T-Mobile to build their next gen stack for both consumer and the business segment and to run it for them as part of the Managed Services model, and later on expanded that to CloudOps, which I will talk about in a minute. Also AT&T. A recent announcement, in fact, just this week, is that after AT&T has selected us earlier this year, again to build their next gen stack for the future in consumer mobility, the heart of their business, they now selected us also to support that over a multi-year managed services engagement and extended the consumer mobility managed services agreement we had for the full consumer business signed in 2019, extended now through 2026.
Obviously, a very meaningful achievement for us. When I look on the next generation of managed services, cloud operations is at the heart of it. We believe that our customers will shift to the cloud, but we'll be in some kind of a hybrid environment potentially, as this journey to the cloud is not happening overnight. We have the expertise both to run the IT systems on-prem, as well as to run the new cloud-native stack on the cloud environment. We are moving forward in selling the cloud operations as part of the next gen managed services to our customers where they see great value in this proposition. Just two examples, AT&T, T-Mobile, and there are others. All of that is translated into a strong backlog.
We report a metric of the next 12 months backlog because we believe this is providing the investors a strong leading indicator on the momentum of our business. Looking traditionally, the backlog, the 12 months backlog represent visibility of roughly 80% of next 12 months revenue. You can see on the right-hand side of this slide, the acceleration we've seen in that metric of the 12 months backlog, leading to the acceleration in growth and hopefully giving us, of course, the confidence of why we believe acceleration of 8% midpoint of 2022 is something that is definitely possible.
When we look at the backlog itself, sometimes we get questions, "Okay, what do you include in that?" Given the fact we have high recurring revenue with key customers, there we already have some track record of that recurring revenue, and we include that in the 12-month backlog. For any new project, any new engagement with a customer or any new deployment of a product, we are counting in only the signed activities. I believe it's quite conservative. All of that in turn is helping us and having that consistent operating margin performance that you've seen over the years. We've been tracking quite significantly within the, I would say, upper end of the range we've provided over the years.
We decided now to update the multi-year range to 17.2%-17.8%, and we are aiming to track roughly at the mid of that range. Of course, we can move a couple of tens of basis points from quarter to quarter, but roughly speaking, tracking at the midpoint of that range, so roughly 17.5%. The reason we can provide you with such a strong execution that translate into this consistent profitability is lying in the fact that, A, we have visibility going into a year. We can plan. We have a global delivery model. We have access to talent and ability to mobilize talent between different project, different activities that are happening. As a certain project naturally ramps down and another one starts in another part of the world, we can obviously move resources around.
Of course, very tight and disciplined focus on operational excellence, bringing new tools, new automation, different methods of how to do things more effectively, and managing that while continuing to invest in growth. If you look on 2021 as an example, while revenue was growing by 7%, we increased R&D investment by over 10% and still expanded margins year-over-year by 30 basis points. I wanna talk about some key drivers for growth when we look at it across our customer base. We talked about the industry mega trends. We talked about the great innovation and technology we bring. But then when we look about our incumbency already in the industry, it's a great vehicle to continue and grow. We have many opportunities to grow within our existing customers as well, of course, expanding to new logos and new countries.
When we look on our existing customers, obviously, we want all our customers to adopt the greatest and latest technology and capabilities we bring to market. We've seen great success in such adoption, and we continue to move forward, as Anthony mentioned. No customer will be left behind. We will build the right journey for every customer to adopt our recent capabilities and move forward with this and expand and grow while retaining, of course, expand and grow our presence in existing customers. We can also grow within existing customers by selling more and more capabilities that are new. For example, when we augmented years ago our capabilities to network automation and everything around network optimization, that was a natural capability to go to all our existing customers and offer that and grow by that our wallet share within the existing customers.
The second group here, customers that are tier one customers, we have a foot in the door, but definitely huge room to expand by penetrating farther. Those would be names such as Verizon. We are very excited about the relationship with Verizon, where we sold already a few deals in recent years. After many years, we had hardly business with Verizon, but obviously the opportunity ahead of us is much bigger, and we continue to push to bring value in Verizon. Same goes in Charter. We are just in the first, I would say, few years of relationship with Charter, continuously seeing growth in revenue. Very excited about that and believe that we can grow farther. There are many other names. The third group here would be other affiliates within conglomerates that are having multiple affiliates around the world or new logos.
Example for that would be CK Hutchison Group. We started in Three Hutch in Ireland, did a wonderful project, where we brought the value to the Irish affiliate, and then expanded from there to Three in the UK, initially with a business deal, meaning modernizing their systems for the business domain, and then recently expanded that into the consumer domain. By the way, under a Managed Transformation model that I mentioned before. Same with VEON. VEON is a large group that is having a lot of business in Russia, in East Europe, in Eurasia. We had a very important win couple years back in Russia, where we are building under a Managed Transformation, a new stack, and running Managed Services.
The recent announcement that we've shared with you this week is that we expanded the relationship with VEON also to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, and now pushing that into Eurasia. All of that is translated into the fact that we can add more and more countries and more and more new logos, and by that diversify our base of business around the world. Just as an interesting data point, the number of countries generating $50 million or more for us more than doubled in the last decade. five out of the top 10 customers of Amdocs are international by now. A decade ago it used to be two. It doesn't mean that we lost any customers.
On the contrary, all our top 10 customers of the past are customers of Amdocs, continuing to do business with us and moving forward, in getting the value that we can bring. When we look on the ability to take all of that great executions, the margin profile of the company, and generate free cash flow, we believe we have a strong muscle of how to do that. Of course, we are focusing on how to allocate capital in a smart way that we can both fuel the growth of the future while returning ample levels of cash to shareholders.
When you look on the capital allocation of the company, you can see at the right-hand side that over the past four years we've been investing heavily into growth in the form of R&D, in the form of M&A, building a new campus to attract talent in the competitive talent market of Israel, and at the same time, returned roughly half of that capital to shareholders in the form of share repurchases and dividends that are increasing every year. When we think about our capital allocation framework, we are focused on fueling the growth and returning cash in a balancing act. We are focused on maintaining a strong balance sheet because our customers care a lot about that, as they are relying on Amdocs to run mission-critical systems under long-term engagements.
We would like to maintain an investment-grade rating, which we have, and continuously, of course, manage the business with some working capital, but that doesn't require a lot, probably $a few hundred million alone. Then the debt capacity is primarily left to fund M&A in the future. We are committed to M&A. We've mentioned the fact that we've done some bolt-on M&As in the past. We are very successful in our M&A strategy. We are selecting to do M&A primarily to augment innovation, sometimes to add to a new adjacent market or to expand our customer base. All of that needs to start with a strategic framework in mind and to support our strategy, a cultural fit with the target company, and obviously meet the financial thresholds. Now, I'm mentioning this cultural fit, and this is not just a phrase.
One of the key aspects of succeeding in integrating the target companies that we acquire is focusing already in the diligence phase, into the diligence, in the getting to know the target company on the engineering, on the cultural fit, which makes it all successful eventually as we integrate those companies into Amdocs. When we're looking on the ability of the business to generate cash, we are committed to roughly 100% earnings to cash conversion over time. We have a business model that enables us to do it, but some years have some investment in working capital, and some years actually benefit more than the 100%, such as 2021, when we had 140% earnings to cash conversion. Unfortunately, we didn't find a pattern how to do it every year, but we are definitely committed to a 100% over time.
In fact, for 2022, guided to be at 100% conversion rate. When we are looking on the capital allocation over the years to our shareholders, you can see that we are very disciplined. If you look over the last decade, 98% of the cash flow we generated was returned to shareholders in the form of share repurchases and dividend. I wanna talk about the culture. We mentioned before the talent. We mentioned the ability of talent to develop, how much people are at the center of what we do as a company, and we believe that our contribution to society is something that is in the soul of the company. We are in the midst of connecting societies all over the world in, just in terms of what we do. That's our purpose.
We have the ability, in terms of our access in 85 countries with 28,000 employees, to contribute to many societies around the world, and we definitely have the value set to do so. I want to talk about that a bit. As a global company, we are focusing on that naturally through the access that we have to communities and the products we bring to the industry, so I will touch upon that in a minute. Definitely prioritizing that and putting that in focus is something that is really important. It's not just that we happen to be there. It's very intentional, very focused in terms of the drivers that we focus on and how we are looking at these topics around the ESG. I'm proud to say that we are recognized by leading rating agencies around the world for our achievements.
For example, Dow Jones Sustainability Index North America graded us in the top 10th percentile in the last two years. Hopefully, the new rating will come out, and we will maintain that position. Sustainalytics, for example, ranked us at the top 7%. We are continuing to focus on doing it because it's the right thing to do, but great to see the recognition and the benchmark. I wanna talk about diversity and inclusion. It's in the heart of what we do. Again, having the 85 countries, by definition, means that we have a lot of cultures, a lot of access to different kind of people around the world, and we see our mission, not to just leverage that internally in terms of giving the right inclusion and the right opportunity, but leverage that to impact the environment we live in and the societies we live in.
We are very focused on multiple vectors, the gender diversity, inclusion of people with disabilities, and obviously people of different ethnic backgrounds. Touching upon the point of gender diversity, I think we have a lot to be proud of. Tech by itself is challenging. The number of graduates out of STEM in universities in the different markets in which we operate is roughly 20%, 30% in good locations. We are continuing to bring the focus to push for the percentage of employees we have from the female segment into Amdocs. We have by now 31% globally, but in some markets we reach, like Israel, we reach already 44%. In fact, in the past year in which we were hiring a lot, we hired 50% in Israel, for example.
We would like to see that, of course, all over the world. 40% of our P&L is managed by female leaders. 27% of our managers in Amdocs is led by a female. Everything we do, every process that has to do with compensation, evaluation of employees, et cetera, we have real-time information presented to managers so they can make the right decision in context, in this moment of truth, where they have to make decisions, they have all the information in front of them, and obviously we monitor that from the management point of view. I'm very proud to say we were selected as best workplace to work in India for females in 2021. Obviously very important given our strong presence in India. We have a lot of focus also on inclusion of people of different minorities.
For example, in Israel, we are the number one tech employer for Arabs. For those of you less familiar with the Israeli population, Arabs are less included usually in tech. We feel that through different boot camps, different activities that we are doing and different access that we enable through digital training, et cetera, et cetera, we managed and continue to bring people to Amdocs from the Arab community. We are also promoting people with disabilities. We had just recently finished a dedicated boot camp for people with disabilities and hired many of them into Amdocs, which is obviously great. Continuing to focus on people with different ethnic background around the world, here in the States, in other places, in terms of creating the right networking, the right opportunities for everyone to succeed in Amdocs.
All of that is happening also with the communities we are living in. Just as an example, we are very involved in a great initiative that is happening in Israel to enable Jewish women in Israel that cannot leave the village because of their tradition, through education, through boot camps, to work in tech and actually fulfill their potential. This is just one of many examples. Looking on digital inclusion, it's another vector that we are highly focused on. Naturally, being a technology company at the heart of the digital transformation of our customers, we have a lot of skills, a lot of capabilities to help in that domain. We do obviously the, kind of the basic things, contributing equipment.
The less obvious things is that we contribute a lot of volunteering time into educating people, helping the elderly during COVID just to give them access to different applications that they don't have a clue how to go into. Our volunteers are helping them do so. We just finished a massive volunteering program in Philippines, where many of our volunteers help students in rural villages to get access to digital education through different webinars. There are many examples like that around the world that we're very proud of. Even the organizational health survey that I mentioned before, we leverage that opportunity. We said that every employee answering the survey will enable contribution of computers in Africa, in Kenya. That was a great initiative as well.
We are also protecting, of course, the environment we live in and push sustainability through the products that we have. Just few examples, when we're thinking about simple bills that go out, we talk about millions of bills that go out every day. We are enabling with our products to move that from paper bills to electronic bills. When you think about how you measure different things that have to do with car congestion in London and the car emission in London, our system enables the London citizens to be actually part of this clean car program. When we are thinking about how we encourage people in underserved world, part of the world in terms of banking services, to have access to mobile banking.
Of course, when we are thinking about that and how we measure ourselves, we are looking to distinguished rating agencies, whether it's an EcoVadis or CDP, and continuously improve from year to year in terms of how we measure. We are committed to the science-based targets, and improve that over time.
Even our new Israeli campus is obviously looking to be LEED strict green building. It will be very exciting to see that next year, by the way. I want to tie all of that together. When we look on the great innovation in technology, the mega trends that are happening in the industry, everything I talked about in terms of execution, consistent model, et cetera, we are very happy to see how all of that is connected now to acceleration growth, to the inflection point we've already seen in 2021 with 7% growth, and now looking into 2022 with 8% growth at the midpoint. Accompanying that with double-digit total shareholders' return, as measured by EPS growth plus our dividend yield. Already for the consistent second year in 2022, coming with this double-digit performance I think is really exciting.
I want to invite Shuky to come back for the wrap-up session, and then we will move to the Q&A. Thank you.
Hi, everyone. So as you can see, I have Tamar and Anthony by myself. I'm sure pretty sure that by now you feel how excited we are about the position of Amdocs, our industry, and the potential for Amdocs to accelerate growth in these evolving mega trends. I want to recap, take the opportunity to recap everything that we discussed today. Obviously, I think that this slide covers everything that we discussed today. Our strategy is very aligned with the mega trends of the industry, and we're supporting our customer in deploying 5G, digital journeys, journey to the cloud, and more, and I think that the fact that we are so aligned actually supported more our growth. We have best customers in the industry.
You heard it in my presentation, Tamar's and Anthony's. We are working with the largest ISPs worldwide and ISPs in all the world, and I think that this market presence and leadership position definitely support our growth. We have a very experienced leadership team. I will get back to it. We have unparalleled technology offering in the industry. This is obviously this is not what we are seeking. It's obviously our strong backlog shows and the fact that we are winning all the RFPs show that we have the leading technology, definitely also as recognized by industry analysts. Very systematic M&A approach. We always say that we are doing M&A for three reasons. The reasons are to support the strategy. One of them is to do bolt-on technologies, as we've done some lately.
Some of them when we want to acquire competitor, and some of them, if we believe that we need to go to new domain, network for example. We've done several years ago. A very systematic and M&A approach. We have highly talented employees. Now I know, and I want to go back to the experienced leadership. I know that every CEO saying that his team and his people and his leadership are the best in the world. I can tell you, if you ask the customers, not Amdocs, they will tell you that the leadership team from Amdocs are the most professional ones. They will tell you the employees of Amdocs are the most committed and talented ones. I hear it again and again.
I can tell you that we got a lot of recognition from customer in the starting of the pandemic, how Amdocs overnight, working from home, continue to serve the industry in a great way without any disruption. Unique business model. I'm sure you heard enough between me and Tamar and Anthony about our unique business model, that together with our technology, people actually put us in a very advanced competitive position comparing to the competitors. Very focused R&D investment to support our strategy and innovative mindset in everything we do. This is if I try to wrap everything that we discussed today so far. Tying it all together. If I need to give you my last pitch before we move to Q&A.
I believe Amdocs have a very strong foundation for accelerated growth. We talk about operation, operational access, unique business model. We talk about our technology, and I think that, our competitive advantage. The industry mega trends that are happening, and as we said before, they just started, are increasing SAM, and actually the part that we support within the SAM today on, or the new part we support is actually growing in accelerated pace. Very solid business momentum is reflected. I think solid, maybe we should use a great business momentum here on the slide and not solid, giving the, what happened to our backlog in the last year. Strong execution. We are the only one that executing in the industry. We talk about transformation. Most of the transformation in the world are failing, which not Amdocs involved. Couple with very growth-minded capital allocation.
Therefore, I believe that we are very well positioned to generate multiple opportunities to drive revenue growth, accelerated revenue growth, and double-digit total shareholder return. I think at the end of the day, from everything you hear from us, this is why I believe that Amdocs is an exciting investment opportunity. Now we'll turn the call over to Q&A and answer your question. Thank you very much.
Okay, now we're going to move to Q&A. For the analysts dialed in please press star one on your telephone to enter the queue. For those of you listening on the webcast, we do encourage you to submit questions over the chat feature in your browser. Just while we're queuing up the callers, we're gonna start with a question that we've received. I think, Shuky, this one is for you. Early on the call, on the earnings call earlier this week, you announced that AT&T had selected Amdocs for cloud operations in support of its BSSe. This would seem to be a very important development, so can you share more about the significance of this deal and Amdocs' role there?
Thank you, Matt. Definitely, as you should, you all know we are serving AT&T for decades. I think that if I want to talk about this last deal, I want to go back first to 2019. At the time, we announced a very important deal with AT&T to actually extend our managed services support for AT&T consumer mobility system for the current system that AT&T is running and some new domain, like in security and data. About 12 months ago, as part of the progress with AT&T, we announced that AT&T selected Amdocs actually to build the BSSe program. This is complete modernization and simplification of their consumer mobility platform, leveraging the all this technology that Anthony was talking about before, the cloud-native technology of Amdocs under an Azure platform.
Again, extremely important program that we are doing right for AT&T. The last announcement that we announced early this week was about the fact that AT&T also selected two. There were two awards in this announcement, if you guys could see. One, that AT&T selected us to do the operation, the cloud operation of the new program that we are now in the process of implementing for the new consumer mobility platform for AT&T. Secondly, that we extended this agreement we've signed in 2019 in the consumer domain until 2026. Very important development. We continue to serve AT&T, and we believe this is another further proof point for our continuous relationship with them.
Thank you, Shuky. We're going to now take a question from the line, and this one comes from Jackson Ader at JP Morgan. Go ahead, Jackson.
All right, great. Thanks for taking my questions, guys. My two questions are actually kind of around the same thing, which is the expanded serviceable or expanded addressable market. The growth domains, I mean, should we take serviceable to mean that you already have the products in place to go ahead and attack that market? Or are you gonna have to supplement either with organic R&D or M&A in order to capture that whole additional market?
Hi, Jackson. Good morning. When we talk about the SAM, you could see two parts in the slide. One of them is our traditional part, that's all the regular systems that we deploy today, and on top of it we put in a different color the part which is accelerating today, and we definitely like the journey to the cloud and 5G. This SAM includes a system that we support today. It does not include new domains that we might do in the future. So this is for your question. The parts which are growing in a faster way are the parts that we have discussed all over the day, about network automation, 5G, digitization, journey to the cloud.
These are the parts that are growing faster with the new SAM that we presented earlier.
Okay. On one of the slides in the back, Tamar, when you were kind of breaking down the uses of cash, you know, there wasn't a ton kind of left for maybe investments in sales and marketing. Given the additional markets that Shuky just laid out or the additional opportunity, will you need to maybe invest in some sales and marketing efforts or resources in order to kind of capture this new growth rate?
Hi, Jackson. We are investing obviously in sales and marketing and doing it for some time to expand both globally. As you've seen, we've expanded significantly into new countries and new logos, as well as continuing to push into new domains. We don't feel there is a need for a rerating of that investment level. We are investing, we are pushing forward. We are continuing to do that both in terms of sales capabilities as well as marketing investments. You may have noticed, for example, our recent campaign around the rebranding, the Make it Amazing. So yes, that required certain amounts of money, but I don't think it's moving the needle on the company overall. And while doing that, we are targeting to be at the 17.2%-17.8% profitability.
Thank you, Tamar. Thank you, Jackson. Next question is from the line of Tim Horan at Oppenheimer. Tim, are you there?
It's actually Edward Yang on behalf of Tim Horan. Thank you so much for this deep dive today. It's very helpful. Just on a basic level, Shuky and Tamar, can you tie everything back to a multi-year revenue cadence? I'm surprised you haven't provided that. A lot of talk about pretty powerful words, megatrends, inflection point. Your customers are obviously completely transforming, these are your words, and need you more than ever. I guess on that point, qualitatively, is this the best operating environment that you've been in for a while?
In the context of that, the 2022 revenue growth target 8% at the midpoint, 10% at the high end, what are the opportunities for upside for that, both in 2022 but also out to 2025, in terms of the growth, the long-term growth outlook? Thank you.
I can start, and Tamar can add. I think that you describe it right. I mean, yes, we gave a range. We believe that the company is very well-positioned, and I think that the most important thing in what we are saying is that these megatrends are here to stay. We used early innings. I think that we're looking forward to another rev year of accelerated growth. We believe that we are positioned to deliver it. At the same time, we are trying to see what we can, if we can do better, like we've done this year. Tamar, you want to add?
I think maybe to add some color, we've seen the backlog acceleration already for several quarters now. Looking just on the sequential $100 million plus we've seen in Q4, we continue to see that broad-based, which is great. It's coming from different parts of the world. It's coming from different drivers of investments, new logos, existing customers. I think the more robust the growth opportunity is in that manner that it's diversified across different kinds of drivers, the more likely we are to reach obviously the higher point of that range. As always, we talk about demand, but at the same time, it's about customer appetite for pace of execution.
While we have different deals in the pocket, and ones obviously that we see in the pipeline, the combination of both the demand and signing the deals and the pace of execution the customers would like to move at is defining some of this kind of granularity of where exactly do we fall within that range. As Shuky said, we're very optimistic. Also looking on the pipeline ahead, we see great opportunities there.
Thank you, Tamar. We'll take a question now from one of the chat submissions. Can you talk a little bit about the competition? You know, who keeps you awake at night? Which ones have a business model that might be similar to Amdocs, if at all? What are the factors that you really believe at the end of the day help you to maintain such a good win rate?
Yeah, I mean, I can start. Look, I don't necessarily think there is one competitor that keeps me up at night or keeps us up at night. In different domains, we compete with different people, so whether it's in the cloud domain or whether it's in the product domain, whether it's charging, whether it's network. You know, this is why I think Amdocs is very unique when it comes to end-to-end offering. We don't see the same play in every different domain. Now, specifically, if you ask, you know, what keeps you up at night, it's making sure, you know, our workforce is ready and coming out of this pandemic and making sure we have the right talent resources, the upskill. Those are the things that, you know, we're working really hard on and to execute on this strategy.
Whether it's through, you know, a bolt on M&A, like Shuky said, increasing R&D and the acceleration of it. You know, those are the things we're really focusing on. I can't say, you know, there's one competitor that we wake up every day and worry about.
I want to add to what Anthony said, that there is no other Amdocs in our industry. By the way, the list of competitors of Amdocs grew over the years, not because. By the way, we killed many competitors in our domain initially. But at the same time, whenever we move to a new domain, definitely it comes with competition. We moved to network, obviously it comes with competition. Anthony talked before about our digital consulting capabilities. It comes with competition. We respect competition, but I think that, on top of our technology and unique business model, I think another thing that differentiates Amdocs is like this amazing winning DNA. In Amdocs to lose is not an option.
I mean, you look at our business team, you cannot find better people than that.
Thank you, Shuky. Our next question is coming from the line of Will Power at Baird. Are you there, Will?
Yes, I am. Yeah, thanks for taking the question. Maybe two questions. A lot of discussion around 5G monetization, you know, the significant opportunity there as 5G networks are rolled out around the globe. I wondered if you could help us just crystallize what that can mean a little bit more. I think it'd be helpful just to understand, you know, what are some of the real use cases that 5G is driving versus maybe what you saw with 4G or LTE. When does the, you know, the revenue, you know, for both your partners and you all really start to ramp from those more unique, you know, use cases that 5G might enable?
Yeah. I think it's a multi-year journey as we talk about, you know. You know, today we spoke about what we call non-standalone 5G, which is really, you know, just bringing speed to the table and a little bit more, but not really building the full functionality of 5G. As you talk about these use cases, you know, consumer is one thing, so we know about all the experiences we see in the 5G VR headset and the classic examples. But I think what the industry's excited about is really the ability to transform the enterprise space. Whether it's, you know, in agriculture or healthcare or anything like that, all of a sudden, you know, you can deliver low latency, edge computing, 5G-based services and really monetize that very differently.
I think these are parallel streams, and I think, you know, as we look to the future, people are just being innovative. You know, use cases we didn't think about. I gave you the example of the lab out in Seattle. You know, every day I see these use cases that we didn't even dream about, but people are stitching technologies together like eSIM, cloud, 5G, edge, and all of a sudden, you know, just building these amazing use cases.
Okay. Maybe just to dovetail on that, thinking about, you know, the 5G theme, I know, you know, you all have made a bigger push into, you know, network planning and optimization, you know, partly through acquisitions over the past several years. Maybe just talk about the trends you're seeing there. How much are these 5G network roll-outs, you know, benefiting you from that standpoint in terms of helping actually, you know, plan the RF engineering and whatnot?
Yeah. You know, getting in at, you know, really the beginning around the planning stage and how it's optimized and deployed based on, you know, whether you're using millimeter wave or C-band or wherever you are in terms of spectrum, that really gives us an insight into how the network is managed, how the traffic is managed. You know, as we do that to their customers, you know, all of that intelligence goes back into our portfolio and how we design it. Now, using a real-world example of that, you know, a recent use case was a customer we helped design, deploy, and build a private network for around an organization that really wanted to have a standalone private network, and they used 5G as a technology, basically to start to build out and roll out their network, you know, versus a connectivity medium.
I think that has really helped us. It helped our ability and our skill set, helped infuse intelligence into our product, and I think in the future, open up more opportunities like private networking as, you know, more enterprises start to think about how they manage their own networks differently.
I want to add also, Will, is that I think as Anthony mentioned today, when you move to 5G, before you get to this exciting use cases, there's a basic, I mean, the current charging and policy system that's running for 4G cannot run on 5G. Every Amdocs customer in the world will have to upgrade his charging system and policy. You want to be able to monetize differently. This is why we see this investment cycle around the world, definitely in North America, of upgrading all the operation system, monetization system to support 5G. This is even before you're talking about sophisticated support of edge compute, of enterprise use case. And this is what our customer are doing.
The use cases are evolving, but more important is that since no one know exactly how every use cases will fall out in the future, all our customer want to have today a platform that can answer any demand and any offering in the future. This is why they're investing heavily today to make sure that when the use cases will evolve, they will be able to answer any competitive advantage and to come up with any innovation that they want to come in this domain.
Yep. That makes sense. Thank you.
Thank you, Will. We'll go now to another question from the chat. One question here that's kinda topical: How does inflation impact your business? You know, to the extent that you have long-term contracts, are you able to pass along any of the cost inflation increases before contracts renew?
When we look on inflation, you know, obviously the contracts that are long-term are looking into some kind of indexation, you know, whether it's related to inflation or whether it's related to other specific metrics of country. When we look on our cost base, we are focusing on that from different parts of the equation, if you will. You know, obviously we have labor costs, we have premises, we have different kind of costs. In every one of them, you know, if I can broaden the answer, it's not just about inflation, it's about different aspects that can change our cost structure. Could be currencies, for example. Operating in 85 countries, you have to think about currencies and how it may impact us. We're very focused on that in planning.
The global delivery scale that we have, we are thinking about the different macroeconomic parameters that can be at play, and we're trying to build that into operational decisions where possible. Where operationally it's not feasible to do so, we are looking into how to protect ourselves through different derivatives, et cetera. For example, the hedging program, thinking about the currencies. Going back to the inflation part, we don't feel that as of now in as a meaningful part of the parameters that influence the financials. Yes, everybody's talking about inflationary pressures, but frankly speaking, in most of the countries we are operating in a meaningful way, it's not the case yet. There are some countries in the world where it always has been the case in very drastic Argentina, for example.
We are equipped to deal with that, and have the experience. Thank you for the question.
Thank you, Tamar. I think we're gonna go back now to Jackson at JP Morgan again, who has a follow-up question. Jackson, are you there?
Yes. Yep. Thanks, Matt. Yeah, just a quick follow-up. Shuky, you just mentioned about the policy and the charging engine that Amdocs has for 4G and that it, like, simply can't work for 5G. Do you or Anthony mind spending, you know, a couple of minutes really quickly just explaining technologically, you know, why that is and why every Amdocs customer is going to need to upgrade as they move to 5G?
I can try, but I'm sure Anthony can do a better job.
Let's see how you go.
Really, yeah. Go ahead.
No, thank you.
No, no. Go ahead, Anthony.
Look, I think it's about the richness and the capabilities that 5G brings to the table. If you think as 4G, you know, think of it essentially as a best effort in terms of delivering a service, and now you think of all of these capabilities that 5G brings to the table, right? I gave you the example, Fred, you know, that I was telling you that I myself have, you know, five connections or five devices that are powered by my service provider, right? Managing these five on a multiple relationship. You know, as 5G is evolving, as the new standards are coming out, you have things like network slices that need to be rated, need to be charged differently. You have things such as latency.
You know, for example, if you have a healthcare device that needs zero latency, that needs to be faster, maybe need to be rated and charged and provisioned in a different way than, you know, your regular phone or your regular iPad. These kind of, they're not nuances, they're material changes that are happening on the network. You need to have a modern charging system, you need to have a modern policy system. They need to be running on the cloud so you can use cloud scalability. These are the reasons that our customers are choosing to upgrade, and we're getting into this upgrade cycle.
In simple terms, Jackson, this is at my level. If you are done doing this upgrade, you cannot enjoy the 5G advantages over 4G. You will operate a 5G environment in a 4G type of capabilities. I think after all our customers spending billions of dollars to be competitive in the 5G era, this is something that they cannot do. This is why they must upgrade.
Right. Okay, great. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Jackson. We now have another question. Tamar, this one might be for you. The Managed Services business has done very well over the last year or so, but we did see a sequential softening there in Q4 for the first time in several quarters. What was the reason for that, and is there anything that we should, you know, be thinking about in particular there?
When we're thinking about Managed Services engagements that we disclose as a separate revenue item, as I said before, we have many customers that we run the IT operations under multi-managed services engagement, but at the same time, we run development enhancements for them, or we may be through a transformation project of sort. When we have such a situation, that engagement as a whole is categorized as a Managed Services engagement that goes into that revenue disclosure item. Therefore, you may see some discretionary fluctuations of this development work, this project work, as part of the Managed Services disclosed revenue. I don't think you should give any attention to these quarter by quarter changes. I think the vector over time is the one, frankly, you should be focusing on.
when you look at the last several years, you can see significant expansion of both the number of customers.
I think you showed in your presentation. I think it was, like, 50%.
59% of revenue now-
No, before
It was 52% in 2016 of total revenue. We've seen significant increase in the number of customers that are adopting Managed Services. As I shared in the presentation, we're still excited about dozens of our customers having Managed Services engagement with Amdocs. Given the 350 customers that we have, we see huge room for expansion. Even with the existing customers that already selected us for Managed Services, there is opportunity to continue and expand the scope of what we do for them under that.
On top of that, CloudOps, that is giving a new opportunity for a next gen kind of managed services, where we can help our customers under the managed services framework deal both with the on-prem systems that they have as they transition to the cloud, deal with the CloudOps, and we can do both, which is a great accountability model for them.
I want to clarify something that we discussed today is about when we talk about SAM, we're talking only on external spend. We're not talking about IT. In most cases, when we do Managed Services, we are replacing IT.
The internal IT.
The internal IT. This was not included in the SAM, and this is typically driven by the internal IT, and in many cases, actually, the internal IT is handing over to us as part of the agreement.
Okay, thank you very much, Shuky. I believe we have a follow-up question from Tim at Oppenheimer. Tim Horan, are you there?
Yeah, Matt, it's Ed again. Just can you comment on the increased level of promotional activity in North America, in the U.S. in particular, between cable and some of your telco customers? As a result of that, have you seen any change in the sense of urgency and tenor around the conversations around, you know, possible upsell opportunities on your end? Thank you.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Look, I think first of all, you know, it's all good for us. They're all our customers, so we're here to support all of them, right? Let's start with that. Second, as a consumer, I think it's very interesting, you know, the differentiation, whether it be sometimes it's based on the best network, sometimes it's based on the experience, sometimes it's a combination of the two. I think we'll see this continue. Back again to, you know, the multiple devices, you know, the partnership ecosystem. We'll see different types of differentiation. I think, you know, that competition is healthy and it's good for the market and it'll be here for a little while longer.
Okay.
Thank you.
Thanks, Ed. We'll go now to another question from the chat. This one's probably for Tamar. Actually, this is a double-barreled question. Given the recurring revenue and the stability in the business, how do you think about balance sheet structure and the trade-off between growth investments and perhaps buyback acceleration? Then somewhat related to that is the campus. Could you provide an update on the status of the campus? How far are we in terms of the budget completion date, and what do you think are the ultimate benefits of the new building once it's completed?
Great. Starting with how we think about the capital allocation, as you've seen, we've invested heavily into the growth of the company, both in terms of the R&D acceleration that we've had and investing over $1 billion in the last couple of years, and for the M&A, the acquisitions that we've done, such as, you know, Openet, an acquisition we've done in the summer of 2020, which is definitely major, in terms of our go-to-market policy, charging of 5G. By the way, the integration is going great. Thinking about the growth investments, we're definitely investing in that. At the same time, we have the capacity, given the strong cash flow coming from the business, to return very nice amounts to shareholders.
That's why I thought it's interesting to show that in the last four years, it's roughly balanced between how much we can invest in growth and invest heavily in growth and at the same time return cash. Now, the reason also that we've taken into consideration the investment of a non-strategic asset, the open market, the investment will return that cash to shareholders because that kind was abnormal in the sense of cash generation beyond way and above our regular business cycle. Even if you look on our regular business cycle, we are committed to 100% conversion of cash from the earnings that we make, and we'll continue to have this balancing act. It may change a bit in terms of fine-tuning that.
We are continuing to push for the mindset of majority of cash returned to shareholders, but we're not committed to a specific amount because we need to have that kind of flexibility to invest in M&A while we're returning cash. By the way, look on the last decade, you can see that commitment is translated into 98% of cash returned to shareholders from the cash we generated from the business. We are very serious about that. Talking about the campus, we are very excited. This has been a very important project, building the new campus in Israel, where we have thousands of employees and major parts of our R&D that are done in Israel, and we think it's going to be amazing attraction for talent.
It's going to be completed in the summer of 2022, so 2022 is going to be the last year of investments. Under the budget of up to $350 million, we have $130 million remaining to be invested in 2022. To remind you, we didn't go into this just because it's financially attractive, but it is financially attractive to go into the new campus. While we are going to enjoy great talent attraction, it's going to be also beneficial to 2023 in terms of the financial performance.
Thank you, Tamar. I believe we have one more question from the chat, and this one relates to Europe. We did see some slowdown in Q4 on a sequential and year-over-year basis. What was the reason for that? Are we still comfortable that Europe can be a growth engine in 2022 for us?
I will start. The short answer, very much so. I will hand it to Tamar.
We're excited about Europe. In fact, thinking about that backlog acceleration, we see Europe in-
A lot of it comes from Europe.
Very nice part, and very happy about evolving relationship we have with groups such as CK Hutchison. Vodafone, for sure, has been a major customer in Europe and continues to be very important. VEON, et cetera. The reason for that sequential weakness has to do with some natural ramp-down of some project activity and the fact that new programs that we've been winning recently are starting to ramp up. We are continuing with probably one of the largest transformations in the world, which is Vodafone Germany, continuing very successfully. I think it's nothing to pay attention to, and we are very focused on seeing the trajectory of growth continuing in 2022.
Thank you, Tamar. I think we have one final question. This one is in relation to the SAM. We showed that it's growing at, you know, high single digits, kind of CAGR through 2025. You know, understanding that things can change if the SAM materializes in that way, you know, what is the confidence level that Amdocs will be able to grow at least in line with the SAM over the next few years?
I think what we've seen over the years, and definitely plan to continue to do, is take market share. While we are serving the end markets and focusing on pushing our capabilities into the higher growth areas of cloud and digital transformation, et cetera, beyond that, we are taking market share by a very high win rate. As a company, if you look on our history, you know, decades, two decades, we've always been growing faster than the market that we are at. We plan to do so. We believe we have the right tools in terms of the innovation, the right people, the right global scale, definitely great customer base, and we'll grow faster.
Thank you, Tamar. We're not showing any other questions at this time. Shuky, I'll hand it back to you.
First of all, thank you for joining us this Friday morning. I am pretty sure that by now you feel how excited we are about the future. We believe that Amdocs is well positioned to capture this opportunity. Like we always do, we'll continue to execute on our strategy. I believe that this is really an inflection point of accelerated growth for Amdocs. Thank you very much.
Thank you.