Source: GlobeNewswire — Originally announced February 4, 2020.
Overview
Amdocs (NASDAQ: DOX), a leading provider of software and services to communications and media companies, announced in February 2020 that Bell Canada — Canada’s largest communications company — had successfully implemented RevenueONE, a core component of Amdocs’ cloud-native customer experience suite CES20, running on Amdocs Microservices360. The deployment builds on a long-standing managed services relationship between the two companies and marks a significant step in Bell’s ongoing digital transformation strategy.
What Was Implemented and Why
Bell’s implementation centered on two key Amdocs technologies:
- RevenueONE: A billing and revenue management building block within the CES20 suite, designed to simplify retail engagement and support complex product and pricing models for communications service providers (CSPs).
- Microservices360: Amdocs’ core microservices platform that, combined with DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices, is intended to shorten the code-to-production cycle and accelerate time-to-market for new products and services.
The goal was to give Bell both the technical agility to adapt to rapidly changing business conditions and the operational tooling to continuously deliver improvements to its digital retail experience for customers.
DevOps and CI/CD at the Core
A defining aspect of this implementation is its emphasis on DevOps culture and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) methodology. Communications service providers like Bell are increasingly expected to behave like software companies — shipping features rapidly, recovering from failures quickly, and scaling infrastructure on demand.
Microservices360 is designed to serve as the enabling engine for exactly this kind of transformation:
- Microservices architecture: Breaking monolithic BSS/OSS systems into independently deployable services reduces the blast radius of changes and allows teams to deploy components on their own release cadence.
- CI/CD pipelines: Automated build, test, and deployment workflows reduce manual handoffs and enable frequent, lower-risk releases.
- Site Reliability Engineering (SRE): Applying SRE principles helps balance the pace of feature delivery against system reliability — a critical concern for a national carrier like Bell.
- Cloud-native design: CES20’s open, modular component model means Bell can adopt new capabilities incrementally without requiring a full platform replacement.
Industry Context: CSPs Transforming to DevOps Organizations
Telecommunications companies have historically operated large, tightly coupled BSS (Business Support Systems) and OSS (Operations Support Systems) stacks that are difficult and slow to modify. As competition from digital-native players intensifies and customer expectations rise — particularly in the lead-up to 5G service rollouts — CSPs like Bell face pressure to modernize at speed.
Adopting a cloud-native, microservices-based architecture directly addresses several of the most common pain points:
- IT velocity: Independent services can be updated without taking down the entire platform.
- Business agility: New product configurations, pricing models, and customer journeys can be launched faster.
- Scalability: Cloud-native workloads can scale horizontally to handle peak demand without over-provisioning permanent infrastructure.
- Vendor flexibility: Open, modular designs reduce lock-in and allow best-of-breed integrations.
Quotes from Key Stakeholders
“As the pace of digital transformation continues to accelerate, it’s critical to adopt cloud-native, microservices-based technologies and DevOps best practices and tools. Together with Amdocs, we are rapidly developing and deploying new capabilities to support Bell’s customer service leadership in a new era of integrated digital communications.”
— Saad Saade, Vice President of IT Delivery, Customer Experience, Bell Canada
“The ability to use open, modular components to enrich existing IT capabilities is a fundamental design principle of CES20 aimed at improving business agility and ensuring focus on areas of greatest business opportunity.”
— Anthony Goonetilleke, Group President, Amdocs Media, Network & Technology
Key Takeaways for DevOps Engineers
This implementation illustrates several broader principles relevant to DevOps practitioners working in or adjacent to the telecommunications industry:
- Modernization doesn’t require a big bang. Bell extended an existing managed services relationship incrementally, adopting cloud-native capabilities as modular additions rather than replacing everything at once.
- Platform and practice go together. Microservices360 is presented not just as infrastructure but as a combined platform-plus-methodology that bundles DevOps and SRE practices alongside the tooling.
- SRE is becoming standard in telecoms. The explicit mention of Site Reliability Engineering alongside DevOps signals that reliability engineering is now expected even in traditionally operations-heavy industries.
- CI/CD is the mechanism, not the goal. The pipeline exists to serve a business outcome — faster product launches and a better customer retail experience — not as an end in itself.
About Amdocs
Amdocs is a software and services company focused on the communications and media sector. As of fiscal year 2019, the company reported revenue of $4.1 billion and employed approximately 25,000 people serving customers in over 85 countries. Amdocs is listed on the NASDAQ Global Select Market (ticker: DOX). More information is available at www.amdocs.com.
This article is based on a press release issued by Amdocs on February 4, 2020, distributed via GlobeNewswire. Financial figures and employee counts reflect conditions at the time of the original announcement.