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Wells Fargo's 9th Annual TMT Summit

Nov 18, 2025

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

I will grab some water. My throat's just been dry all day.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Yeah.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

I guess this is the official sponsor.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Yeah, I know.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

I've never seen it, but.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

It works. All right. I think we're all set here.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

I'm Richard Poland on the Wells Fargo software team. Today I'm delighted to have with me Anthony Goonetilleke.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Very good.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

S ee what we practice. Group President, Technology, and Head of Strategy at Amdocs. Thank you for coming here today.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Of course.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Appreciate you.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Thank you for having me.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Yeah. I guess, maybe a good place to start.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Just in terms of level setting the conversation. Talk to me a little bit about Amdocs, the story. Just kinda what does this company do, and what problems do they solve?

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah. So we, you know, we are a company very focused on customer experience and very focused on the vertical of telecommunications. So we've been there for quite a while. We provide a set of products and platforms that really sit at the core of telecommunications. And, you know, we don't do hardware, so it's purely software all the way from soup to nuts. We really focus on taking the complex and simplifying it, right? I always joke around and say, you know, if you're Zappos, you know, it's a cool job. You just have to pick a shoe, get the shoe size, and get it delivered.

If you're a phone company, you know, it's like you need a phone number, you need to transfer your phone number to the device, you need a handset, you need to add it to a family plan, you need to make sure there's promotions, there's discounts that get applied. Is it a yearly contract? Is it not? There's so much complexity that goes into the back end. We try and really abstract all of that and really provide a seamless customer experience to the user.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Great. I think a good pivot point from that is just in terms of the business model.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Mm-hmm.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

I think Amdocs has a pretty unique business model.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

In terms of the software and services combination.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Can you tell me a little bit about that business model?

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah, sure. So we have, obviously we have a very strong, recurring software revenue model. Our customers are tier-one customers, right? Like, these are not companies that are in and out of these, you know, I can mention any one of their names and you would know them. They are the top-tier customers in any country. We build products and software and we invest in R&D. We also take accountability to implement them. One of our philosophies is, you know, you get a product company, they throw the product over the fence, and then you get a services company that gets it, and they're trying to implement it, and then there's a problem in the project and they're pointing fingers at each other.

We like to take accountability to not just give you the products but also implement it, make sure you hit your business outcomes and your KPIs. We feel that that accountability model is very unique and that's something that our customers appreciate because at the end of the day, you know, we're there for the long term. We have, you know, long-term contracts with our customers. We do not necessarily lose customers, right? It's not like an industry of 50,000 customers. It's a fixed set of customers. We want to make sure, you know, we're delivering value, but they're not just buying software from us. They're buying value from us in terms of what their business outcomes are.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

That's great. I guess, you know, with kind of that vertical focus.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

I'm curious, when you go out there and look at the telecommunications providers that aren't using Amdocs.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

What, what's the alternative?

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah. The alternative is, I would say, a mixture of like 17 different things. For example, you know, some may be in-house, then you might get this company, that company, try and like stick it together with duct tape and glue and kinda hopefully that it will work. You know, we spend a lot of money investing in research, investing in R&D, trying to bring like the best of what others do to the telecommunications industry, also understanding that, you know, at the end of the day, our industry is mission-critical, right? I always make the joke that, you know, if, you know, obviously we know about all of the internet issues from today, right, with the Cloudflare stuff. Like if Gmail is down or WhatsApp is down, you'd be like, "Oh, WhatsApp is down," you know?

If your phone service is down for four hours, I mean, people's lives are at stake, right? When you're building software for the industry, you need to take like that responsibility is very, very high to provide a very high-level, mission-critical, carrier-grade level of software, that delivers value. I think, you know, when we build software and we think about it, all of these things kinda go into it, and that ties back to your initial question of the accountability model, why we think it's very important.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Yeah. That's great. When we think about, I guess, if we were to bifurcate the business.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

You know, there are two customers that make up a big chunk of the business.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

I think it's around 50% of the business. Then there's a lot of customers that make up the other half. When we think about, I guess, the growth drivers.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Or the differences between those two types of customers, I guess, first, you know, what are the differences in the growth drivers? Then second is, does that change over time? Do those smaller customers, can they look a lot more similar to those larger customers?

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah. And that's always the goal, right? Like when we come in, you know, we might come in and, you know, a customer might choose to buy a single product or multiple products, and we always wanna add value. Because we have a wide portfolio, we always have an opportunity to sell more and increase our footprint, right? If you look at customers like we have PLDT in the Philippines, right, and we have Globe in the Philippines that, you know, just started off small and kind of started to grow as they got value from us and bought more from us. Even though I would say, look, I mean, you talk about kinda this bifurcated couple of customers, but, you know, together they're like revenue of $200 billion, so they're not, they're not small in a way, right?

We have been with them for the long term. We have had, you know, obviously we have been loyal to them, they have been loyal to us, and the business has grown over time. We feel like also there are many other opportunities around the world, you know, just this last quarter, we announced some deals with PLDT, with BT. You know, these are customers that are very strong in their country, in their region, you know? Brazil, for example, growing economy, growing customers. Japan, we had some announcements in the last couple of quarters. We feel like definitely, like if you look at our top 12 customers, about 50% of them are coming from outside of North America, right? That is obviously the goal, and we think that is an opportunity for us to expand and grow clearly.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Great. Okay. If we switch gears a little bit and talk about just the overall growth drivers of the business.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

You know, one of them is cloud.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Mm-hmm.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

I'm curious, you know, cloud, I think it's 30% of the business, growing double digits. How should we think about how you guys define what a cloud customer is?

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Sure.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Let's start there, and then I'll have a follow-up on that.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah. So if you think of telecommunications companies in general, they were the kings of data centers, right? Because they, back to what I said before, they were running mission-critical stuff. No one else could run it for them. So they had their own data centers on-premise, and they used to run software in them. Fast forward 2025, there is a bifurcated approach of moving some of these workloads to the cloud. We have very strategic partnerships with, you know, AWS, Azure, GCP, and we help our customers move these workloads to the cloud in a couple of different ways. One way is, you know, migrating to our new stack, which is cloud-native, cloud-enabled, which runs on public clouds. This is one way to do it.

Another way is if you have legacy stuff, you know, we think of, we call it refactoring technologically, right? because maybe you do not wanna put a huge investment in it, but you wanna move it to the cloud. There are multiple different ways that you can take these workloads from on-prem and then migrate it to a public cloud. This is where kinda the growth and the revenue comes from. We're still, you know, I would say we're still, maybe towards the end of the first quarter, to use a football term, in terms of migration to the cloud. I think that's still a multi-year journey. Right now the focus is on IT workloads, but we also have network workloads, which is an opportunity.

I think this is, you know, just a multi-year journey, which we, you know, we've done some very interesting acquisitions like a company called Astadia, which helps migrate and modernize mainframe systems to the cloud. We think this will be a good growth pillar on an ongoing basis for the company, both from our products' perspective and also our services' perspective.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

All right. You stole my second question. It's gonna be what ending of cloud are we in? But that's great.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

I guess like kinda the second addendum to that is similar to cloud, you know, your earlier stages on the curve with AI.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Mm-hmm.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

AI has been a big focus for the company lately.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Mm-hmm.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

I guess let's start on the product side.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yep.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Tell me a little bit about amAIz.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yep.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

That's kinda live now, and you have some new things coming next year. Talk to me a little bit about the product side.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah. We kinda split it into Horizon 1, Horizon 2, you know, Shuky, our CEO, you know, very, very early on, I think it was like almost like a month after kinda the OpenAI publicly launched, you know, a couple of years ago, we said, "Look, like we are doubling, tripling down, and we wanna be the leaders in the telecommunications space." We never looked back. Some of that includes disrupting some of what we do internally ourselves, right? It is better for us to do it than anyone else. It is clearly an opportunity for us. Some of the results we see, so we've been running more than a dozen POCs around the world, and, you know, I've been in technology for 20 years. I have never seen technological results like this.

We created a partnership with NVIDIA, so we're working with, you know, the agentic framework to include it in our amAIz platform. In Horizon 1, some of the results we saw, I'll just give you a few examples. If you take a call center, telecommunications providers have some of the biggest call centers in the world, right? Probably next to financial services. They generally measure three key KPIs. The first one is called average handling time, meaning how long am I on the phone when I call, right?

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Mm-hmm.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

The second one is called first call resolution. Do I resolve your problem the first time you call me? The third one is around what we call TNPS, or transactional net promoter score. Basically, it means are you happy with the service I provided you? Yes or no? Would you recommend me to anyone else? All the KPIs boil down to kind of, these three.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Okay.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Generally, a technological project or transformation gives you like maybe a 7% uplift on a good day, a 10% uplift. Like we are seeing 40%, 50% uplifts on all three KPIs. And now we're starting to see in the last two quarters customers going from proof of concept to going to production. We think, you know, there is definitely something there. Obviously, we do not play in the BPO space or the labor arbitrage, so we are good with bringing technology that really adds value and moves the company forward. This is really an opportunity for us. As we look towards Horizon 2, we believe there's an even bigger opportunity to help our customers kind of use their systems of record and then put what we call our cognitive core to modernize their transformation and go faster.

Think about, you know, recognizing revenue faster, launching new products faster by using generative AI. Because we have this, you know, so we've built like a very deep taxonomy in the telecommunications space and an ontology. These are things that are very verticalized in terms of generative AI. Today, a lot of people talk about horizontal capabilities, which are good and nice, but, you know, when you're delivering results and value to an industry, you wanna be very verticalized and understand what you do, right? It's not just good enough for you to take an order, but you need to know that you can provision it, you can deliver it, that the number that you use is the number that you're gonna get. All of those things are being taken into account.

We are, you know, very bullish when it comes to generative AI. We think, you know, it's an opportunity for us. There's really no downside. Especially the, you know, the strategic partnerships that we have with NVIDIA really kinda helps propel us in that space.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

That's great. When we think about, you kinda, you mentioned some of the ROI that customers are seeing with some of these pilots, and when we think about how that translates to your revenue.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

How should we think about the uplift from a customer that's now starting to use a lot of the AI technology that you're providing?

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah. Look, I think, as we go into 2026, this is the first time we're seeing some of these opportunities go from proof of concepts to production.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Mm-hmm.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Right? This is when we're, you know, we're just starting to see kinda some of the early Horizon 1 revenue start to hit. We really think that customers are going to buy differently in the future.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Mm-hmm.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Right? It is not about saying, "Well, I used to buy this. I'm gonna continue to buy that," and then just buy a little sprinkle Gen AI on top, right? No, customer's behavior is gonna change, right? I am going to have a workforce with, you know, several capabilities that are being delivered by agentic capabilities, not just my labor. When they're buying from us, now they're thinking differently and buying differently. I was just talking with a customer this morning around the network space. That is another big one for us. There is so much data there, right? Service assurance where you can be just proactive, and a lot of this work was done by labor, done by, you know, BPO and outsource work and things like that.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Yeah.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

We think, you know, that should start to impact, obviously, our revenue starting, you know, 2026. We're already starting to see some early signs of this revenue. For us, it's all an upside, right? 'Cause the core system business in terms of transformation will continue to be there. This is a system of record.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Mm-hmm.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

It's not gonna disappear. Generative AI is not gonna replace the customer. The customer's the customer. You have these capabilities of being able to deliver things faster, better, and also do that labor arbitrage for where you were using 10,000 people, maybe you only need 3,000, right? I know it's probably not a popular term these days, but it's happening, right? People are gonna be, you know, retooled and looking at different ways of doing things.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Yeah. Now that, that brings up an interesting question, which is internally, you know, I, I think a lot of the margin efficiency has been.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Kinda utilizing AI internally.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Mm-hmm.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

What kinda things are you guys doing internally on the AI front?

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

How have you seen that impact your own cost structure, and how does that kinda inform how you go to market with your own products?

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah. I'll give you an example. We have a platform called ConnectX, which we launched in record time. We have about 15, 16 logos on it. It was kind of almost built GenAI native, right? So it's smaller teams. It's faster to market. When it comes to our core bigger systems, we're delivering more value. You know, there's a, don't wanna get too technical, but there's a term called PIs, which essentially these are like project increments, which are releases we bring in and functionality we bring in. We're doing that faster, better. Obviously that has an impact in terms of how we can deliver stuff, right? We are early, right? It's not about just dipping our toes in. I, you know, I think about 70%-odd of our employee base is trained in one shape or another, and that will only continue to increase.

I think there will also be a bunch of people that won't make the cut, right? And we're starting to see that. I know it's a tough message, but there will be the ones that do and the ones that don't. When it comes to software development, we are A to Z, all the way from design to build to test to delivery to operations. We think generative AI is gonna have an ongoing impact.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Great.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

We just saw Gemini launch today. The results are phenomenal, right? And we, you know, there's many great platforms out there like Cursor and things like that.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Yeah.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

That we embrace. You know, people do also forget that there is two types of software at the end of the day. If I go like to a 40,000 ft macro view, there is what we call deterministic and non-deterministic.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Mm-hmm.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Right? The deterministic software still has a place, like enterprise, carrier-grade, mission-critical systems. When you call 911, you wanna make sure that call's being made, right? You don't wanna best effort. There are still a place for deterministic software and non-deterministic software as well.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

I guess on that front, I'm curious, like, you know, I think there's been a lot of conversation around the limits of what the current state of generative AI can do.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

At certain pieces. I'm curious, like, when you guys were thinking about productizing this, you know, what did you find was working really well?

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yep.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

You know, you talked a little bit about the data advantage that you guys have.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yep.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

You know, you guys have a lot of access to the telecommunications data.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yep.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

That kinda runs through your own system. I guess the combination of a couple of things is.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

How does that data shape some of the products and how does kinda the limitations you've seen so far, the things that it's really good at and the things that it's not so good at inform also the product?

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah. I'll start maybe from the end. Look, I think you can't have generative AI without data and vice versa, right? I think the fact that we are the systems of record, that we know, for example, you know, there's a term in telecommunications called ETF or early termination fees for different, if you terminate a bundle or an offering or whatever, right?

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Mm-hmm.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

We know that there are 230 database entities that impact early termination fees, right? We can program this in and we can educate the system, right, tell our agent that any of these change, it will have an impact on proration. You are smarter, you are focused, you are not guessing, right? This is like a very simple way to kind of explain how the data connects to the logic of, at the end of the day, kind of what you deliver. In terms of limits and what we found, look, I think the most amazing thing, and I do not think this is a surprise to anyone, is really the transition between kind of NLP, natural language processing, to technology, right? The fact that someone can go there and just type something in, in their own way, and it will translate.

By the way, we're doing it in, we have agents running in Arabic. We have agents running in Spanish. It translates across languages very, very well, so we think that is kind of one of the massive, massive advantages. I wouldn't necessarily say, look, there's a limit. Things are changing every week and every month. I think, you know, obviously we are living in the golden age of speed at the moment. I think every week, you know, I pride myself that I wake up and try to read for an hour, hour and a half every day to catch up. Even that's not enough anymore, right? Like there's so much going on. I think it would be unfair for me to say, "Hey, like here is the limit." I don't think anyone knows what that limit is.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Mm-hmm.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

I think we're just gonna get more and more value, that's being extracted from it. We will learn how to use it. We will learn how to have deterministic software and non-deterministic software. The models will mature more and more. I think, you know, we're in for a fun ride for the next five years. I think if I think about what we believe we can do and how we can help our customers, it's really an opportunity for us. I mean, there's no real downside.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Yeah. That's helpful. I'm curious, when we think about the underlying technology stack, you know, you kinda messaged next year is a bit of an investment year in on the AI front. I'm curious, like, how do you balance like, "Oh, I'm gonna use.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yep.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

You know, X, Y, Z models off the shelf versus we're gonna fine-tune a lot of these.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yep. Yep.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

How do you just kinda walk me through the, the under-the-hood technology stack?

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah. Yeah. Look, I mean, we're still, you know, we're still increasing our margins by 20 basis points, right? So we're not decreasing it, which kinda, without going into details, tells you that, you know, yes, we're using some money for investments and stuff, but we're still continuing to return stuff, right? Last year, we also increased, returned a big chunk, from a margin perspective. So I, we as a company, we understand our investors also appreciate kind of the return of, you know, the back to the shareholders, right? You know, we hold our margins from that perspective. I think we also continue to invest. We invest hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D every year, and we'll continue to invest it. Remember, we also can rearrange where we're investing it, right?

Five years ago, if the biggest thing was around network automation, we'll go, "Okay. Now we'll take some of that spend and put it on these agentic models. We will accelerate them because that can be a growth engine." While those other engines are still functioning, maybe they do not need as much money. The second point to this is, you know, as kinda head of R&D and engineering, what I can get from $10 today is much more than I could have got from $10 three years ago.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Yeah.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Right? So that's why I think that, you know, I think we have a good balance. And, you know, look, at the end of the day, I'm sure all our investors would love our top line to continue growing and us to have these growth engines for future years. But it's also something our customers require from us, right? Our customers come to us, not, you know, we're not just a general FI that says, "Hey, tell me what to build and I'll go build it for you." Like we're coming to them going, "Hey, like here's what we've done to this model. Here's how we're working with it. Here are several network agents you can use." So we're bringing technology and R&D to the table that they can incorporate into their ecosystem.

I think that's why customers choose us at the end of the day, rather than just this à la carte menu and going, "Hey, sir, tell me what you want me to build and I'll go build it for you.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Yeah. That's great. You mentioned it a little bit earlier, but just kinda as it comes to the NVIDIA partnership, can you talk a little bit about the partnerships you have with some of the others in the technology ecosystem?

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah. Yeah. Look, I think we have four key strategic partnerships, right? It is NVIDIA, AWS, Microsoft, and GCP. Of course, there are many others, but those are, I would say, the big, big four. They are valuable for multiple different aspects. Our customers are large customers. They are not small companies. Yes, we may have a say on, you know, whether they go to AWS or whether they go to Azure. Also, they are very bifurcated sometimes in who they choose as a web scale provider. They may say, "Hey, my core systems might be on AWS. My data may be on GCP." You will start to see more and more of that, I think, going into the future, right?

In the same way you see large language models, you know, where else before we may have had, you know, OpenAI only on Azure, whatever, you know, I think I read this morning about the Anthropic, Azure announcement and stuff like that. You are gonna see this kind of coexistent bifurcation. These strategic partnerships are just as important to the web scalers as they are to us because at the end of the day, telcos have huge workloads that need to be migrated to the public cloud. If our systems run cloud natively on AWS, it is fantastic for AWS because they have an opportunity to take this compute workload and move it to the cloud. In the same way that we want to have a partnership with them, they also want to have a partnership with us. You know, there is a very close relationship.

We work very closely with them in both kinda migration projects, but also investment into kinda future roadmap items. With NVIDIA, you know, we've worked since day one on what were their NIMS infrastructure, kinda their microservices agentic infrastructure. We couple ours very closely. Our R&D developers sit together, for example. When we come to the table, we can even help prioritize some of our customer requests to what they can deliver. You know, I think the NVIDIA guys were telling me, you know, the stuff we rolled out in one of our customers in the Middle East was one of the first time actual agentic capabilities have been rolled out to customer care. It's real, it's live, and it's delivering real value in production.

You know, there's a lot of hand waving today, a lot of slides and PowerPoints saying you can do this, that. When you actually see it and you go, "Wow, like your NPS just went up," it's pretty cool, you know? It's very, very satisfying as a technologist to see this kind of, the results come to life.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Yeah. ROI has been an interesting thing to measure with AI.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yep.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

It seems like you guys have a pretty defined, I guess.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Come talk to me. I can show you the ROI.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Do customers, like, are they, you know, we mentioned a little bit about the monetization element.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yep.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

I also think one thing that's interesting is kinda the pricing model that you guys have. You guys have priced on outcomes, right? I feel like that's novel to a lot of other software players.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

I'm curious, you know, what informed that in the first place?

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah. Yeah.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

How do you think that helps you today?

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah. I love that question because, you know, usually I'm trying to educate, you know, someone asking the question about that. We've always worked on a kind of an outcome-based model from the perspective of we wanna add value to our customers, right? So we're looking at business KPIs, we're looking at business milestones, making sure the software goes versus, "Hey, you have like 5,000 people. Let me charge you 5,000 seats," or, "You want, you know, 100 people. Let me charge you." We don't have that type of model, right? Our model is always we develop products and software. We are after a targeted outcome. We wanna achieve your business KPIs and your business results. When people start talking about outcome-based monetization models in Gen AI, you know, like we're like, "Okay. That's great.

This is what we do. You know, again, it's not a huge disruption for us. We're like, "Where do you sign up?" Right? What I will tell you though, as an industry as a whole, I think people are still trying to figure out what that monetization model is. It's not like anyone has come out and said, "Hey, this is the, like first we thought it was based on tokens, you know, Microsoft has the PTU model." Everyone's trying to figure out exactly what that is, right? I think we still have a bit of way, but we're, you know, looking at it with a few different customers, like how do you charge for an agent that adds value and reduces 40% of your workforce, right? Versus buying a technology that does it versus having a managed services contract that does it.

The good thing is we have long-term service agreements and contracts. We have the ability to, you know, kinda test the waters and see. I think, you know, in the next 6 to 12 months, there'll be some equilibrium in terms of some monetization model coming out. It will always be tied, I think, to some level of outcome because at the end of the day, you know, every CFO out there is like, "Hey, it's great that you're buying 100 GPUs. Like show me what the ROI is for this," right?

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Yeah. If you figure it out, let me know. 'Cause that's one topic that, you know, has obviously been big across both software and services.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yep.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

I think, you know, you mentioned BPO and, you know, you're not them, right?

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yep. Definitely.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Now, I guess from an economic standpoint, I could imagine that there's probably some friction on that type of model.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Mm-hmm.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

When we talk about outcome-based pricing versus.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yep.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Billable hours, especially if, you know, if I'm using AI internally.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yep.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

To deliver some of these solutions, I could imagine the economics are good.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yep.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Do you think it's the kind of thing where if we look, you know, three to five years out, it's gonna benefit the margin profile much more than we could kinda really comprehend right now?

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah. Look, I think, I think definitely, you, you when you kinda look at the longer term, right, and look at where things are going, on one hand, today, you may have 10,000 people running a call center, and then you're paying for the 10,000 people, then you're buying 10,000 seats from another provider to pay for the software for the 10,000 people, right? This model is gonna be disrupted, right? 'Cause the moment you drop these 10,000 people to, let's say, 3,500, you're also reducing the seats. That, you know, 6,500 that you're not spending for, maybe you use 40% of that to buy the software that provides better value, better results, and a seamless customer experience. That model is definitely going to be disrupted. You know, ideally, we would love to be the people that, that disrupt that model.

I think when you think from a longer-term perspective, when you're a technology provider, obviously, it should have more of a positive impact on your margin profiles. Now, whether you decide to invest it to grow a top line and, you know, get faster growth, then what you decide to do is a whole kind of another discussion. Definitely, you should see benefits from, you know, software development optimization, from software rollout optimization. When you're a product company, definitely, you know, you're in this space.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Yeah. We've talked a lot about cloud, a lot about AI. Some of the other, I guess, product advancements.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yep.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

eSIM is one.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yep.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Big eSIM and AT&T deal.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yep.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Last quarter. Talk to me a little bit about what's exciting about that and when you think about just kinda how that could evolve.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Yeah. This is, this is something I think we don't get enough credit for, you know, like, I, we have a bunch of SaaS platforms in the company, you know, our eSIM platform, our ConnectX platform, our MarketOne platform. Really, that is doing really well. Now, obviously, you know, they're not massive material that it impacts, you know, the company from a huge way. But, you know, these have a ramp up and they have an increase, right? You take eSIM where, you know, Apple is now starting to roll out, you know, in the U.S., you can't buy an iPhone with a physical SIM card. Internationally, you still can, right? As they started to change, you know, we have over 30 customers on our eSIM platform today, right? You start to see the network effects start to play.

I mentioned ConnectX, which is a SaaS platform. We see a world where, you know, you have the Kardashians in LA have SKIMs, right? Think of influencers launching their own MVNO platform, right? Why not? Right? Because, you know, if Taylor Swift launched her own mobile platform on Monday, I guarantee you she's gonna have 6 million subs on Monday morning, right? And so the ConnectX platform allows you to launch an MVNO literally in hours, right? We give you a login name and a password. You can go in there, fully GenAI native. You can say, "Hey, I wanna launch a brand that is Gen Z native, that targets these types of things," put in all of the information. It'll create the app for you. It'll create the framework for you, and you'll be able to launch it.

Obviously, you need a partnership with an AT&T or a T-Mobile or Verizon or whoever to have the network connection, but we'll enable you to just launch it fast. And so we feel like these are expansion areas for us potentially to get into spaces that are not necessarily core telecommunications revenue either, right? You could have, you know, a celebrity that wants to launch. You know, we're talking to many people at the moment that are really interested in launching it. It's interesting talking to some of the celebrities and kinda influencers. They also wanna curate their brand and curate their ecosystem. They see connectivity as being a red thread maybe that glues these things together. That's a very exciting opportunity for us, together with eSIM. The MarketOne platform is another way for our service providers to sell digital products and services.

You know, we've gone from like everyone had a cable box to today, how many subscriptions do you have?

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Too many.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Too many, right? And like, so, you know, MarketOne is a place where it's like one place. You see all your subscriptions. You can buy it, remove it, add it, and you kinda, you know, it's back to having a holistic view of the world. This platform is growing well. We have several million subscribers on the platform now. These are, you know, small things we've invested on the side, but that have a good growth trajectory that we're very excited about for the future.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Awesome. That's probably a good place to wrap it up. Anthony, thank you for your time today.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Thank you for having me.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

Thank you so much.

Anthony Goonetilleke
Group President, CTO, and Head of Strategy, Amdocs

Great to be here. Thank you.

Richard Poland
VP, Software Equity Research, Wells Fargo

All right.

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