The Communications Industry unit of Oracle yesterday came out with at least three pieces of news: a new release of its data collection, storage and analysis solution, a new WebRTC session controller, and a cloud-based billing and revenue management solution for service providers.
Chris King, senior director of product marketing-communications industry, in a meeting yesterday morning with Webrtcworld, explained that Oracle Communications Data Model is a purpose-built data warehouse for the communications industry. It has been shipping for a couple of years. What’s new here is release 11.3.2 of the solution, as well as two applications that can run on top of it. One of the new applications is billing analytics, which is designed to enhance the billing analytics using Oracle proprietary algorithms to help CSPs understand where they are making their money.
The other new app is called social network analytics, which looks at relationships between things and can be applied to relationships between customers so that service providers can identify such customer groups as influencers and followers, and can predict churn, and do more targeted upselling and cross-selling. A mobile service provider in Nigeria was among the early testers of this solution, which is targeted at all kinds of service providers, but can be especially useful for mobile operators, said King. He added this solution can greatly speed the time to improved analytics.
The new Oracle Communications WebRTC Session Controller, meanwhile, is the first new product following Oracle’s acquisition of Acme Packet. This is not a rebranded Acme product, explained King, but is an entirely new solution that brings together Oracle’s SDP technology with Acme Packet technology. It was announced today and will be available shortly.
WebRTC, in case you’re not familiar with the term, enables browser-to-browser phone or video calls, or can connect the browser to something else – like a browser to a gaming network or a mobile network, for example. And it can enable those communications without the need for a client download.
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The Oracle solution allows service providers to support multiparty calls, and maintains session state, so if a connection drops it doesn’t affect the other connections. Oracle is targeting its WebRTC Session Controller both at service providers and an enterprises, at which WebRTC can be used to extend the unified communications experience within the contact center (WebRTC can allow for the escalation of a call from one medium to another, and to have the caller’s interaction up to that time captured and displayed in the process) or just by regular enterprise users.
As for Oracle Billing and Revenue Management Cloud, it helps enterprises evolve from selling physical to digital goods by providing them with a subscription-based billing system. Billing, King said, is a relatively complex process, so this solution removes one of the key challenges in this customer transition.
Most organizations offering solutions on this front, King added, are startups, so they don’t have the depth of experience offered by Oracle, which already provides on-premises billing solutions for hundreds of customers.
“This represents a safe choice,” said King, adding that Oracle offers a proven solution and has the financial and human resources to support its customers.
King went on to say that customers using the new Oracle Billing and Revenue Management Cloud can bill on wide variety of metrics, including time, volume, or just about anything else.
While this solution was announced this week, it is not yet generally available, but is expected to be shortly, King said.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
