Amdocs personalization play lands BigPond deal

Australia's Telstra is deploying personalization technology from vendor Amdocs to add customized mobile news and information services to its BigPond mobile portal.

Amdocs acquired vendor ChangingWorlds exactly a year ago for its patented technology that automatically builds mobile subscriber profiles based on user behavior and activity. The platform then delivers personalized content and services to that user based on those so-called "implicit" preferences.

Amdocs is positioning itself to take advantage of an increasingly mobile-centric world, touting the emergence of more "than a trillion connected devices" in just a few scant years, according to Bill Guinn, CTO of Amdocs' product business group

To take advantage of that opportunity, Amdocs aims to leverage its core back-office technologies along with new middleware intelligence like ChangingWorlds and its recent JNetX service delivery platform acquisition to leverage what telecom operators already know about their customers into new service opportunities.

Telstra's BigPond unit delivers ISP and mobile services across Australia. It will use the ChangingWorlds' technology to deliver relevant mobile content based on users' interests; create prioritized portal menus suited to customer likes; and automate the delivery of personalized content to users via alerts based on their ongoing usage patterns and behaviors.

That level of personalization and customization – based on user behavior but also leveraging data the service provider has stored about its customers across many disparate systems – has long been heralded as a major ISP opportunity.

In addition to the ChangingWorlds deal, Amdocs is working with Telstra on a larger, multi-year transformation project to enhance the carrier's over-arching operational support systems (OSS), the companies said.

At Mobile World Congress earlier this year, Amdocs announced a similar personalization deal with Telefonica Europe, which aimed to deploy the ChangingWorlds platform at operators including O2 UK O2 Germany and O2 Ireland.