Oracle’s Service Delivery Strategy Post BEA

It wasn’t long ago that when people thought of middleware, they thought of a company called BEA. Three months and $8.5 billion later, Oracle has completed the integration of its acquired company and moved forward with a service delivery strategy that leverages the technology, but not the name.

Oracle announced today its strategy for delivering an integrated service delivery portfolio. It is designed to help communications service providers “create differentiation in a Web 2.0 world,” said Ty Wang, director of product management at Oracle.

A key component of the strategy is the Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper 4.0, which expands Web services to enable advanced messaging, call control, location, profile and presence applications. It also provides a standards-based environment for automated partner management, network protection and application access control.

The Service Gatekeeper, in turn, is a key component is the Oracle Communications Service Delivery portfolio. It is based on the former BEA WebLogic Communications middleware platform as well as Oracle’s Fusion Middleware and provides the integration to the business and operations support systems missing from some service delivery platforms.

“We have a combined product set now that can connect to legacy and next-generation IP networks and orchestrate the services that are created, set policies for those services, manage them and expose them to any application developer that wants to utilize a telecom network,” Wang said.

Based on a service oriented architectural framework, Oracle’ gatekeeper also supports industry standards such as Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE), Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Diameter

In addition to the gatekeeper, the portfolio includes: the SIP-based Oracle Communications Converged Application Server (formerly BEA WebLogic SIP Server) and the Oracle Communications Presence application for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE.) It also includes two homegrown applications that run on the SDP: the Oracle Communications Virtual PBX and Oracle Communications Residential Telephony, a hosted voice solution.

As for the market for new services, Wang said, “The proving of the technology has been done. The appetite for new services has been proven. The ability for third parties to create services has been somewhat proven. Now it is getting down to the nitty gritty when each operator has to ask themselves if they are ready for it.”

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