"A historic day," is how Amdocs Ltd. (NYSE: DOX) president and CEO Dov Baharav described the company's new joint initiative with US telecommunications giant AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) to set up the Amdocs Innovations Center, which will enable Israeli companies to develop products and solutions with Amdocs for AT&T.
As part of AT&T's "Rethink the Possible" program, the company has set up two centers, two in the US and one in Israel, with strategic partners: Ericsson AB (NYSE; SAX: ERIC), Alcatel Lucent SA (NYSE; Euronext: ALU), and Amdocs.
Amdocs and AT&T did not disclose how much they will invest in the Israeli innovations center, or how many people it will employ, but Baharav and AT&T CTO John Donovan who came to Israel said that the activity had already begun, and that the objective was for full operations to begin before the end of the year.
Amdocs develops billing and customer management relations (CMR) solutions for telecommunications providers. The innovations center aims at fostering collaboration with telephone, mobile phone and smartphone manufacturers, applications developers, and network equipment makers in order to expedite the development of next-generation broadband applications for wireline and mobile devices.
Amdocs and AT&T today called on Israeli companies to approach tehm and work with them. "We've seen that there are smart people even outside of Amdocs," said Baharav. "That's why we developed this program to work with start-ups, and to enable them to grow through joint projects or investment in them."
Amdocs' share price fell 3.1% on Friday to $28.29, giving a market cap of $5.84 billion.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on July 18, 2010
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