As part of its ongoing bid to target telecommunications providers, Oracle took the wraps off Virtual PBX, an important new piece of its planned service delivery platform (SDP).

Generally available Monday, Virtual PBX (public branch exchange) is one of the deliverables Oracle committed to back in April when the database, applications and middleware vendor first laid out its SDP plans.

Those in the telecommunications industry are coming under increasing pressure to rapidly adapt their businesses to mirror the ongoing convergence of data, voice and video services. To cope with the speed of change, carriers, network operators and systems integrators are moving their IT operations to a SOA (service-oriented architecture) approach.

Oracle’s SDP aims to offer telecommunications developers a single programming environment based on Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) so they can build new services quickly as well as integrate and manage those offerings with existing services.

An operator-hosted PBX service for small, medium and larger enterprises, Virtual PBX includes functionality to enable the handling of incoming calls without requiring major changes to the telecom network’s underlying architecture as well as the ability to offer specific bundles of telecom features to individual customers.

Back in April, Oracle sketched out its SDP strategy, explaining that some pieces of the platform already exist like its Fusion middleware and its Oracle 10g relational database, while pledging to release others, including Virtual PBX, later in the year.

As part of SDP, Oracle is expanding its middleware so that users can access newer mobile, voice services and enterprise applications through traditional communication networks and networks based on Internet Protocol multimedia subsystem also known as IMS and VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol).

Oracle has yet to commit to an exact time for when SDP will be complete.

-China Martens, IDG News Service (Boston Bureau)

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