BELLCORE TEAMS ORACLE AND LEVEL 3

Bellcore announced a strategic alliance with Oracle Corporation to integrate the Bellcore MediaVantage stock inventory management module (SIMM) with the Oracle Financials system. MediaVantage is designed to track and manage physical inventory of a telecom provider's plant, at a detailed level, and to provide reports of a network's portable assets. In other news, Level 3 Communications and Bellcore merged their respective technical specifications for a new protocol designed to bridge circuit-based, public-switched telephone networks (PSTN) and emerging Internet Protocol (IP) technology-based neworks. The merged specification, Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGC), is available without a fee to service providers and hardware and software vendors.