Modernizing BSS Platforms: An AWS Q&A With Sean Casey

Sean

Pretty close to that, yeah. We heard from our AWS account rep, and they asked us if we could do a demonstration for Mobile World Congress. Turned around in four weeks and had the use case built out. Really cool, used a lot of different technologies. Amazon Bedrock, Sage Maker, machine learning (ML), GenAI, Amazon Lex for example, from a chat perspective. We were able to pull it together in four weeks and have a really cool use case to demonstrate.

Robbie

I love the breadth and depth of services you leverage. What was the magic formula here?

Sean

Really motivated developers when they get to work with really cool products and technology and a great company to partner with.

Robbie

It seems clear—services are something you clearly value, and being able to select the specific opportunity and technical feature that’s right for you. Are there cultural elements in cloud partners that you really look for as you build this out as well?

Sean

Oh, for sure. And that's how we think about our customers as well. When you build a SaaS product, it's about a relationship. You don't just turn a software product on and disappear for the next four years. When you build a SaaS product, you want to help [your customer] grow their business , and that's what we see in AWS. AWS is effectively a SaaS infrastructure provider with so much more now with the managed services that you guys provide. We have a great partnership because we're continuing to innovate and invest with AWS, and you're making things easy for us to do. We didn't have to go build our own large language model. We could just plug into Bedrock and fire and move on.

AUTOMATING AND PERSONALIZING CUSTOMER TOUCHPOINTS

Robbie

I'm sure it's not only early days for leveraging generative AI not only in the context of Ascendon but across your entire product portfolio. Any early insights into what that might look like beyond Ascendon?

Sean

We have so many customer touchpoints across our products. And every time that we're thinking about a touchpoint with that customer, how do we make it more personal to them? How do we take something that a human has to do and actually automate it based on the years of learning that's going into these large algorithms? We're looking at things like Bill Explainer where we can actually walk a customer through a bill, explain the charges to them and any differences from month to month. Looking at operations —a lot of manual activities take place in operations today, where someone's reading data and making a call. All of that can be automated through AI.

Robbie

And as one such example you mentioned Bill Explainer. If I had a bill that had a data cap of say 15 GB, and I only consumed like 5 GB that month, I went to bed early every night. So you would make that recommendation to leverage a plan that best met my needs.

Sean

That’s exactly right. If you think about that, a lot of our customers have people employed specifically for retention strategies, right? They're working to build a retention strategy, and training specific care agents on how they execute on that. But a lot of times they're evoking that when it's too late. With AI, we can actually predict that early, have the conversation without any training at all and actually grow that lifetime value of that customer as a result.

THE JOURNEY TO CLOUD

Robbie

So if you're providing practical advice to telco customers who are looking to embrace software as a service for the first time, what might you share with them?

Sean

Move now, move quickly, because the benefits are going to be there. You have to get there. If you look at it, that's why technology companies have grown so fast, because they're embracing those types of concepts. That's allowing them to move fast and break stuff. On the telco side, [it has been] very slow to do that. If you start to embrace cloud and SaaS, you can operate more like a technology company. Becoming a techco, right? Which is a big trend we've seen here at Mobile World Congress. And help [our customers] actually move very, very quickly to innovate and drive new experiences to their end customer.

Robbie

I feel like we've covered a lot here in just a few short minutes—exactly like the dev cycle required to build the generative AI experience in the first place! Is there any question I didn't ask that I should have?

Sean

No, I mean, I just think for us, our journey to AWS has been really unique. We actually were running in a private data center in the United States. And we had a European customer and were looking at the cost to expand and run that. Fortuitously, I happened to be at a customer that had AWS presenting to them and I just said, Wow, this is going to change everything. So we cancelled our strategies to build out another private data center, ported straight to AWS. We were the first true cloud-native, multi-tenant SaaS solution from a BSS standpoint to be on AWS. And it's been a great journey since. A lot of customer adoption, really seen a change in the minds of customers in the last three years as they've really started to embrace this, it’s a really exciting space for us to be in.