Oracle Announces SDP

Oracle Corp.’s ongoing buying spree and product build-outs coalesced today when it announced a standards-based service delivery platform (SDP) for the telecom industry.

The product represents Oracle’s verticalization of its middleware platform into the telecom space. The vendor is leveraging its recent acquisitions and compiling existing products to create the IMS-ready offering.

The SDP is meant to address telecom-specific industry trends such as increased competition, diminishing voice returns, the converging of networks, the lingering entrenchment of legacy systems and the overall need to roll out new services quickly, said Thomas Kurian, senior vice president of Oracle server technologies. The SDP allows the creation and near-real-time delivery of integrated fixed and mobile multimedia services via legacy and IP networks and support systems.

"Our vision is to address market needs and provide customers with a comprehensive, scalable, IP- based services platform," said Kurian. "We are building the ideal platform for developing and deploying new telephony services that deliver value over today's networks, both wireline and wireless, and as well as for the converged networks of the future."

The platform has at its core a real-time database (bolstered in part by the company’s TimesTen acquisition). An applications server within a Java environment and support for a range of protocols and interfaces, along with a Java programming API, rounds out the core infrastructure. The SDP also includes standards-based BSS integration to connect to front-office applications like CRM, along with network interfaces to connect to emerging and legacy networks via SIP (enabled by the HotSip acquisition) and Parlay (enabled by the Net4Call acquisition), respectively. Also, an SDP Service Gateway interfaces the network to content providers.

Within the next year, Oracle will roll out pre-packaged applications as part of the SDP as well, such as virtual PBX, push e-mail and content delivery.

The SDP can tie into Oracle’s BSS suite, which leverages the Portal acquisition to provide billing and revenue management, and the Siebel acquisition for multichannel customer management, order and service fulfillment, and analytics.

The platform is commercial, deployed and live at several telcos already, including Telenor.

Other features of the platform include:

* Messaging: Oracle SDP provides facilities to access content from Mobile Devices across a variety of standard protocols including SMS and MMS.

* Communications Infrastructure: including Oracle Database 10g, Real Application Clusters and Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database for supporting always-on, real-time services.

Additional future functionality plans include:

* Call Control, and Charging Facilities: To provide call control capabilities that are intended to work across IMS and Legacy networks as well as a charging enabler to quickly integrate SDP with billing systems.

* Device Management and Device repository: To provide support for standards-based device management, and a comprehensive device repository.

* Integrated user profile: Oracle plans to highly personalized services for providers’ customers, based on customer profiles and preferences.

* Converged Programming Model: Oracle plans to enable a single J2EE-based programming environment to provide support across next generation and current generation networks and OSS/BSS integration, thereby simplifying service development, integration and management for developers.

* Hot Pluggable architecture: Oracle SDP plans to support multiple application servers, including Oracle Application Server, OC4J, JBoss and WebLogic.

Oracle Corp. www.oracle.com

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