The offering, the Service Delivery Platform (SDP), is a telco provisioning platform comprising Oracle’s response to similar initiatives from BEA and IBM. It will support a grab bag of standards and technologies, with Fusion middleware as the core building block that will expose telco infrastructure to an SOA environment.
When we go into an industry, we go all the way, said Oracle president Charles Phillips, during an analyst call. He was referring to a couple of acquisitions Oracle has made on the day, plus one that came just days beforehand.
They included Hotsip AB, a Sweden-based provider of SIP, or Session Initiation Protocol, infrastructure, and Net4Call, a Norway-based provider of Parley and SLEE (Java Service Logic Execution Environment) technology that enables established telco carriers to add IP-based services bridging their legacy infrastructures. They follow Oracle’s recent purchase of Portal Software, a California-based provider of telco billing software.
SDP will include support of a number of telco-related building blocks. It starts with SIP, the protocol favored by the VoIP industry, and IP Multimedia Subsystems (IMS). Supporting technologies include legacy network connectivity via the Java Parlay API (Parlay is a telco services gateway standard) and SLEE technology, which is an event-driven processing approach for Java platforms.
SDP will also include a network adaptation layer; mobile messaging connectivity; and various pieces of carrier grade real-time back end communications infrastructure such as Oracle Database 10g, Real Application Clusters and Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database.
Oracle is coming from a well-established installed base on the IT and business side of telco. According to Oracle’s figures, it claims 90% of the world’s telco carriers use Oracle databases, and with the Siebel acquisition, it claims top position for telco CRM as well.
The SDP initiative is Oracle’s strategy to broaden from IT to the network operations and provisioning side. It claims that on the operations side, most rivals are niche players, and that for technologies like IMS, it will have the deepest support built directly into the product.
The impetus is the way IP technology is transforming the telco business from monopoly to competitive business. Thanks to a stream of new standards and gateways, it is becoming possible to develop new services from a Java platform, using the flexibility of services-oriented networks to compose or orchestrate services on the fly.
With the new standards, telcos could generate new services using Java, rather than lower level network protocols, enabling them to tap a broader technical skills base on platforms designed for more rapid development.
Although Oracle’s base in telco has primarily been on the business side, it claims that it has roughly 20 IMS customer pilots at varying stages of development today. It mentioned Turkcell, one of Eastern Europe’s largest mobile providers, which is roiling out GPRS broadband services.
Oracle says that some of the components of SDP are available today. Service gateway components are currently available a la carte, and will be rolled into the 10.3.1 release of Fusion middleware scheduled for late summer.
On the horizon, Oracle’s future functionality for SDP will include call control and charging facilities that work across IMS and legacy networks; device management and repositories; plus out of the box packaged offerings such as mobile content delivery, VoIP, and virtual PBX.
