Oracle Lays Out Telecom Service Delivery Platform

Tue, April 18, 2006

Oracle made another move to target telecommunications providers Tuesday, unveiling plans for a telecom service delivery platform (SDP).

The move comes less than a week after the database and applications vendor announced its intention to buy Portal Software, a maker of billing and revenue management software for the communications and media industries, for US$220 million.

Oracle is designing the SDP for use by carriers, network operators and systems integrators to help them move to service-oriented architecture (SOA), according to a release.

SOA describes the creation and management of IT systems through reusable software and services. The SOA approach is proving particularly popular in the telecom industry as providers are trying to rapidly morph their businesses to reflect the growing convergence of data, voice and video services.

Pieces of the SDP are already available, and Oracle plans to bring out more functionality later this year. The aim is to provide a single programming environment based on J2EE to make it easier for developers to deploy new services quickly and integrate and manage those offerings with existing services.

Oracle plans to expand its Fusion middleware so that users can access newer mobile, voice services and enterprise applications through traditional communication networks and networks based on IP multimedia subsystems also known as IMS and voice over IP.

So far, Oracle’s SDP includes its Oracle 10g relational database and its real application clusters, as well as the TimesTen in-memory database the company acquired in June through the purchase of TimesTen. Other Oracle acquisitions have helped fill out the SDP, including HotSip, which enables IMS support, and Net4Call, which facilitates support for legacy networks. The SDP also includes a set of adapters to connect the platform to network elements and telecom equipment along with messaging capabilities to access content from mobile devices.

Still in the planning stage for the SDP are call control across IMS and legacy networks, the integration of the SDP with billing systems, support for device management and a device repository, and a suite of services including mobile content delivery, VoIP and virtual public branch exchange.

The SDP will support not only Oracle Application Server, but rival offerings from BEA Systems and JBoss, Oracle said. Oracle had been rumored to be in talks to acquire JBoss in February, but last week Linux distribution vendor Red Hat announced its intention to buy the open-source middleware player.

-China Martens, IDG News Service

Check out our CIO News Alerts and Tech Informer pages for more updated news coverage.

You are here: Business/Management Topics » IT Organization » News Feature

Most Recent IT Organization Stories

White Papers »

Converged Infrastructure for Dummies

As you know, everything is mobile, connected, interactive, and immediate. This is exactly why organizations need a highly agile IT infrastructure in order to keep pace with extreme fluctuations in business demand. This book will help you understand why infrastructure convergence has been widely accepted as the optimal approach for simplifying and accelerating your IT to deliver services at the speed of business while also shifting significantly more IT resources from operations to innovation.

Quantifying the Business Value of VMware View

For this white paper, IDC performed an in-depth analysis of the business value of VMware View, defined as the expected ROI associated with the use of the solution as a platform for the targeted deployment of a virtual desktop infrastructure.

Virtualization reduces costs and complexity for mid-sized businesses

This paper explains virtualization, its benefits for mid-sized business and how IBM's virtualization strategy can help these companies reduce costs, improve services and simplify management.

A Standard Branch Office IT Platform to Optimize and Consolidate

Forrester Research makes recommendations on best practices to optimize branch virtualization and consolidation initiatives. See how a "thin" branch architecture, with key servers, services and applications in the data center that relies on a high-performing WAN connection, can offer the greatest efficiencies.

Maintaining Continuous Compliance - a new best practice approach

When trying to achieve continuous compliance with internal policies and external regulations, organizations need to replace traditional processes with a new best practice approach and new innovative technology, such as that provided by IBM Tivoli Endpoint Manager.

Rewriting the rules of Patch Management

IBM Tivoli Endpoint Manager helps organizations automatically manage patches for multiple operating systems and applications across hundreds of thousands of endpoints regardless of location, connection type or status.

Webcasts »

Apps QuickStart Series Part 2: Designing and Deploying SQL Server on VMware vSphere

Download this webcast to learn about the design considerations for virtualizing SQL workloads, performance and scalability information and high-availability options, as well as support considerations

Quantifying the Business Value of VMware View - Webcast

Many enterprises have discovered that the use of virtualization to support desktop workloads creates a range of significant benefits. These benefits include price efficiencies, improved IT management and greater agility and choice for end users.

This VMware sponsored webcast with IDC will provide both quantitative measurement of the business value -- defined as the expected ROI -- and qualitative analysis associated with the use of VMware View™. IDC will also provide an analysis of the View Composer and ThinApp™ features of VMware View, including the business value of these solutions and an overview of how they work.

Attend this webcast to learn about:
- Challenges and barriers that might impede the adoption of desktop virtualization
- Navigating roadblocks to facilitate a strategic implementation
- Optimizing qualitative and quantitative benefits to IT and your business

Architecting a Modern Approach to Data Management

Applications are changing - they're increasingly web-oriented, global in nature and run from multiple device types. Additionally, the volume of data is growing exponentially every year. How do you ensure your applications have fast, accurate, up-to-date information in this new world? Modern applications are data-intensive; delivering data the old way using monolithic databases isn't working. What's needed is a modern approach to data. One that scales-out as needed and delivers predictable high performance, but without sacrificing data consistency or integrity.

Introduction to VMware View 5

VMware View™ 5 simplifies IT management while increasing end user freedom by delivering desktop services from your cloud. Building upon VMware's leadership in desktop virtualization, VMware View 5 delivers a high-performance user experience while giving IT greater policy control.

View this webcast and find out how VMware View 5 can help you:
- Deliver the highest fidelity experience of desktop services across any device and any network
- Simplify and automate IT management, security and control of desktop services
- Reduce the costs associated with your desktop environment

The CIO's View: Time-to-Value Through Automation

IT professionals are being asked to deliver faster "time-to-value" than ever before. An IDG Research survey found that CIOs are eager to invest in technologies that will enable them to get new applications and services up quickly, achieving faster time-to-value.

5 Steps to Successful IT Consolidation

Learn how to reduce IT management overhead, ease revision control, guarantee data security, scale systems more quickly and reduce server and software costs.

Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter