AMDOCS WINS WEB DATA MINING AWARDS AT KDD-2000

Amdocs, one of the world's leading providers of customer care, billing and order management solutions to the communications and IP industry, has reaped the honors at the KDD 2000 Cup - the world's foremost competition in data mining - held as part of the International Knowledge Discovery in Databases Conference (KDD-2000) in Boston, during August. Submitting in four of the five categories in the competition, Amdocs won two first-place awards and received two honorable mentions. As the only competitor to achieve such results, Amdocs emerges as a world leader in the area of data mining and KDD, particularly in the domain of Web mining and personalization. Amdocs offers a suite of specialist data mining applications, known as `Business Insight' applications, for communications and IP providers that utilize Amdocs' award-winning data warehousing and data mining technology to extract meaningful business intelligence from the mass of raw data held by communications companies.

Over 170 companies and academic delegates took up the data mining competition, including many leading universities and data mining vendors. The challenge involved the analysis of e-commerce click-stream data, collected from an active commerce site on the World Wide Web. Participants were requested to use their data mining techniques to demonstrate analytical and predictive abilities regarding site visitors - analyzing their browsing traits, spending habits and reactions to dynamic links. Amdocs was placed first in two distinct categories - predicting session termination and profiling sub-segments of the site population.

"Amdocs' success stems from our proven track record in integrating data mining components into real operational processes," says Dr. Shuki Idan, who spearheaded the development of Amdocs' KDD applications. "Amdocs' `Business Insight' analytical systems are fully integrated in a closed loop with the operational systems and are updated with the actual outcome of follow-ups. The intelligence extracted from the data is used to improve customer relationships, enhance operating efficiency and reduce costs."

Shlomo Baleli, president of Amdocs' R&D division added: "Traditional Web marketing and advertisement suffers from low click-through levels, low customer conversion rates and low purchase volumes. Data mining is a required technology to enhance service to the end-user through personalization and site optimization, and thus increase revenues. Amdocs proved that it has the best tools and the necessary experience to serve those targets for Internet communications providers and Web sites."

About Amdocs' Business Insight Applications

Amdocs' Business Insight applications, which are part of Amdocs' Communications-CRM platform (C-CRM), comprise modules that utilize data mining and KDD technologies to predict, analyze and manage churn, fraud, sales campaigns and customer behavior. Business Insight applications include the following modules:

• Amdocs' Churn Management module uses data mining and KDD techniques to identify high-value customers with a high risk of churning, and to define appropriate incentives to entice customers to stay. These applications have dramatically reduced losses to carriers caused by churn, and significantly increased the effectiveness of pro-active retention campaigns.
• Amdocs' Fraud Management module uses data mining and KDD techniques to combat all types of telephone fraud. The module uses knowledge discovery techniques to profile customers and detect abnormal subscriber usage that is indicative of fraud, thus preventing telecom fraud while also serving as a deterrent to potential fraudsters.
• Amdocs' www.customer.analysis product utilizes data warehousing and visualization techniques to turn the raw data collected by communications companies into meaningful business intelligence that can be analyzed visually to gauge the effectiveness of new campaigns, price plans, network capacity, payments, business initiatives and so on.
• Amdocs' Campaign Management module utilizes Amdocs' data mining engine to optimize target population segments, personalize offerings and allocate contact channels for proactive campaigns, such as campaigns to improve market share, improve customer relations, acquire and retain customers and promote products through up-selling and cross-selling.

About Amdocs

Amdocs is one of the world's leaders in customer care, billing and order management systems for communications and IP service providers. Amdocs has an unparalleled success record in project delivery of its mission-critical products. With over 6,500 information systems professionals deployed worldwide, Amdocs supports a global customer base. In April 2000, Amdocs completed the acquisition of Solect Technology Group Inc, a leading provider of customer care and billing systems for IP service providers. For more information visit our Web site at www.amdocs.com.

About Ensemble

Ensemble is Amdocs' platform for customer care, billing and order management. Ensemble supports convergent multi-service operations, including voice, data and IP services in wireline and wireless environments. The system utilizes a scaleable, multi-tier, client-server UNIX platform and has been proven to support the high-volume performance requirements of leading carriers.

Contact Amdocs, Norman Rafalowitz, senior vice president, International Marketing, 314-212-7000, info@amdocs.com