Directories infrastructure, billing and software provider Amdocs has launched a new Search and Digital Advertising unit that is offering, among other things, a unified mobile platform for search and advertising. According to the release:

The Amdocs Search and Digital Advertising solution addresses the business requirements of service providers and their business partners by incorporating capabilities for campaign management, inventory management, yield management, optimization and an executive dashboard with a full set of metrics. The solution also supports advertising campaigns across multiple channels and formats including search-based advertising, display, Short Message Service (SMS) and Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) and video.

This new offering also enables service providers to offer self-branded search capabilities. Amdocs' search technology offsets vague and ambiguous search queries to deliver highly accurate and relevant results that improve over time as the system acquires more knowledge about subscriber behavior. The search engine is fully integrated with personalization and ad matching for ad- sponsored search-based advertising. The search is processed in real-time along with contextual (area of interest and location) and behavioral information to serve precisely target advertising relevant to the values and lifestyle of the end user.

This appears basically to be a white label "solution" that puts the company on a collision course with JumpTap, Medio, Motricity, FAST (now Microsoft), Yahoo!, MobilePeople and MCN, which are all seeking carrier deals and distribution. The thing that appears different here is that it the Amdocs platform appears to be somewhat more comprehensive (e.g., text, video, etc.) in its distribution and targeting modalities.

Challenges/problems:

• Amdocs is entering a very competitive arena
• Who's going to sell the advertising?
• It's unclear how good the platform and its purported capabilities actually are
• If users go directly to Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc. to get their search and content all this is less powerful. However, there's a "second bite at the apple" if the de facto mobile experience becomes like that offered the iPhone or the Opera Mini. Then Amdocs can "power" the individual mobile sites (e.g., yellow pages) and search/ads on those sites

Amdocs has lots of yellow pages clients and will be pushing this to them, which puts the company in most direct competition in the mobile space with MobilePeople arguably. Denmark-based MobilePeople has been working with yellow pages and newspaper publishers to build rich client applications and WAP search portals.

Superpages has become an "early adopter" of the Amdocs platform (online).