RIO DE JANEIRO – Some may have been surprised to see Oracle Corp. presenting at the LTE Latin America conference in Rio De Janeiro on Tuesday, but Leonard Sheahan, a senior director at the firm’s communications division, explained that his company is looking very closely at the communications market, along with other verticals.
“There’s a large spend in communications so it makes sense to see if there’s opportunity to sell packaged solutions to operators and other customers within the industry,” said Sheahan.
Oracle, he explained, has spent the last few years building up its communications portfolio through organic development as well as acquisitions and claims it now has “quite a compelling communications division.”
“We see a huge convergence between IT and communications technology,” he said adding that operators were spending excessive amounts of money on developing custom software which Oracle believes it can build for less.
Technology from former Oracle acquisitions like Sun Microsystems is thought to have brought rather a lot of communications software to the table and it’s these solutions Oracle hopes will make it attractive to the industry moving forward.
“Oracle is best known in the IT world where the CIO type buyer knows us,” Sheahan told RCR Wireless News, noting that CTO is now becoming a key area of focus too.
In terms of LTE roll out, Sheahan says operators are looking for solutions in several areas, the first of which is the actual planning, engineering and deploying of the LTE networks. “Operators are really trying to minimize ongoing operational expenses and not recommit the sins of the past,” he said.
Oracle suggests operators look to it to help with capacity planning, smart offloading and “what if” analysis for utilization, network sharing and wholesale strategies, with Sheahan explaining the firm has a network intelligence app that provides a more “intimate view of the network.”
Once the network is actually launched, operators then need to figure out how to best monetize the service, bearing in mind that the prior business model of “all you can eat data” doesn’t provide the revenue returns they’re looking for. Here too, Oracle believes it can be of assistance by providing “very flexible rating, charging and billing models to help operators to more equitably monetize.”
Oracle also believes that as operators start to put more applications on their LTE networks they can create more value, which is why the firm has also developed its own converged application server platform to offer customers support for things like voice, as well as other value added apps.
“Capacity requirements are set to grow astronomically, though,” said Sheahan, citing Cisco’s predicted 39-times data growth over the next couple of years. As the industry is well aware, this growth is also set to put a huge burden on mobile operators and will require more agile planning in backhaul deployment.
“Backhaul is certainly becoming trickier,” Sheahan said noting that Latin America was a high growth market with seemingly endless possibilities and challenges as operators continue to expand on their 3G offerings and prepare for 4G roll-outs.
Select customers already using oracle to accelerate 4G readiness include LG (Korea), KDDI Corp. (Japan), Rogers Communications Inc. (Canada) and Meteor (Ireland), all using Oracle’s Network Intelligence and Network Integrity solutions to better manage their mobile networks.
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