Following its acquisition of Tekelec in March, IT vendor Oracle is seeking to make further inroads into the growing carrier policy management market with the launch of a suite of network monetisation tools.
The Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper 5.1 is a standards-based API exposure platform that incudes a series of pre-integrated gateway solutions such as carrier billing, trusted identity management, messaging and service quality.
Using these capabilities, Oracle aims to help operators reduce costs and time spent integrating conventional network API products, so that they can rapidly offer new and third-party applications and services.
Internal and third-party application providers will find it easier to integrate with CSP networks using the product’s open, standards-based architecture, the vendor claims. There is also built-in integration to the Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF) and network call control.
Flexible platform deployments are also possible for operators, whether they seek to use traditional implementations, virtualised configurations of public/private cloud deployments.
“While there has been a definite trend in the industry toward API exposure, with operators looking to exposing network assets such as call control, location, messaging and presence information for internal and third-party content developers, we are also seeing increasing interest to go beyond these ‘traditional’ APIs and exposing capabilities that provide developers with unique enablers that aren’t available on the device,” said Shira Levine, directing analyst, service enablement and subscriber intelligence, Infonetics Research.
“By extending its API platform to incorporate capabilities such as a Quality of Service API for exposing policy control, Oracle is positioning itself well to capitalise on this trend and help its customers create more dynamic content ecosystems.”
Bhaskar Gorti, Oracle’s senior vice president and general manager, commented: “In a competitive communications marketplace, it is vital that CSPs can rapidly deploy new and exciting services that meet customer and partner expectations.”