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Amdocs continued to make it harder to see them as just a billing vendor this week by introducing a complete order-to-activation solution anchored by the company's new fulfillment manager. The company also strengthened its relationship with Microsoft.

Together with other features from latest software release Amdocs 6, its professional services and partners in the areas of activation and inventory, Amdocs will support all the processes between taking an order for new service and making it available to the customer, whether on a mobile device or at the customer's home or business.

The Amdocs order-to-activation solution unifies service ordering, provisioning and activation across all products and lines-of-business of a communications service provider. This integrated approach for cross-product bundled services helps the customer service professional (CSP) deliver a seamless customer experience.

Now that bundling has become a central strategy for providers around the world, the business processes have become a challenge, said Mike Couture, vice president of marketing for Amdocs. "They have really put a drag on the profitability of new services and service bundles," he said.

The new fulfillment manager is meant to help service providers employ a single service fulfillment system across network domains. It enables CSPs to quickly define, modify and manage business processes in a dynamic environment by allowing them to be linked and mapped throughout the ordering and activation processes.

"If you are a convergent provider selling complex data services across network domains, this solution allows for one single unified ordering system," Couture said.

The fulfillment manager also facilitates integration with third-party OSS/BSS products, primarily in activation, resource management, workforce management and inventory. Other Amdocs products that make up the order-to-activation suite include Amdocs Order Management 6, Amdocs Sales, Amdocs Self Service and Amdocs Activation Manager. Amdocs' professional services organization will act as the prime systems integrator for the solution and take on a complete project management role.

Amdocs also signed a letter of intent with Microsoft to jointly develop, market and deliver solutions through a combination of Amdocs' consulting and implementation services, the Amdocs 6 portfolio and Microsoft Communications Sector's Connected Services Framework.

The solutions will focus on flow-through provisioning and usage collection for Microsoft services such as hosted messaging and collaboration and the Microsoft IPTV platform. Amdocs also will port some of its solutions to Microsoft operating systems and will collaborate on the development of Web services definitions and interfaces.

"It's a relationship we have been working on for some time and we are now starting to bring some value to the market together with our solutions," Couture said.