Oracle Delivers New Capabilities for Oracle (r)Communications Billing and Revenue Management Release 7.3

Oracle today announced the general availability of significant new enhancements to Oracle(r) Communications Billing and Revenue Management Release 7.3.
The enhancements to Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management build upon the superior systems operations management and enhanced business functionality announced with Release 7.3 in September 2006 to provide:

* Innovative new business functions to help deliver greater value to communications service providers’ customers and help avoid churn; greater granularity and control of billing and invoicing operations; and specific capabilities to deliver a superior customer experience
* Improved capabilities to operate a highly available real-time operation required for the highest levels of Quality of Service (QoS)
* Enhanced diagnostic and configuration functionality to proactively guard against potential system issues and quickly identify and resolve problems

The new product enhancements will help Oracle customers gain further flexibility to create more compelling and timely offers and promotions. Customers can also benefit from the architectural and operational robustness required to deliver real-time operations and support expansive growth in usage and subscribers. The new package of capabilities is the result of Oracle’s continued focus on research and development and a strong commitment to deliver strong products that enable communications service providers to distinguish themselves in the market.

“Commitment to our customers drives us to relentlessly continue to innovate and improve the capabilities and robustness of our products,” said Bhaskar Gorti, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Oracle Communications Global Business Unit. “The enhancements to Release 7.3 are a result of the close relationships we have with our customers. Our response to their needs, coupled with a diligent eye on market requirements, results in a focus on delivering superior products, which in turn enables our customers to reduce costs and risks while delivering profit-rich and differentiated services to the market.”

Improving Business Logic and New Pricing and Rating Functionality
New features available with the enhancements to Oracle Billing and Revenue Management Release 7.3 will allow service providers to differentiate their services and provide higher levels of customer satisfaction. Release 7.3 now offers:

* A “best-pricing” feature that allows service providers to offer subscribers optimal pricing based upon usage for the billing period. This feature will also provide subscribers with on-demand best pricing calculations at any time during a billing cycle
* Flexible “dropped call” management functionality to identify a dropped call or a continuation of a dropped call and assign specific discounts or credits
* Dynamic discounts based upon user-defined rules to open up powerful capabilities for innovative discounting such as creating dynamic friends and family discount lists and aggregating discounts for product usage over wide time ranges

Enabling Delivery of Highly Available Systems
Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management Release 7.3 now includes even more functionality to increase system uptime and significantly reduce the possibility of system outages - design aspects that service providers require to exceed already high customer expectations in a real-time communications environment and to deliver the highest levels of QoS. Highlights among the numerous high availability features added to Release 7.3 are:

* Additional system intelligence and processes to increase the availability of the primary (active) and secondary (backup) Transactional In Memory Operational Store (TIMOS) servers used for network grade rating and charging of real-time events
* Improved load rebalancing to increase system performance when restarting system Data Manager connections

Enhancing System Diagnostic Capabilities
The ability to diagnose and respond to system issues and problems, without impacting normal system performance, has been enhanced in Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management Release 7.3. The enhancements aid in reducing the amount of time required to identify system problems, ensuring optimal up time of the Billing and Revenue Management environment. New capabilities include:

* Dynamic logging of debug-level information for specific processes within the system without the need for starting and re-starting the system
* Capture of processing time taken for specific functions within the system that help to determine run-time processing issues

Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management is a standards-based, real-time software platform which enables service providers to radically improve the time to market of new service offerings, build strong brands and lower operational costs, by managing, monetizing and maximizing each revenue stream across any customer type, service offering, partner relationship, payment method, business model or geography. The new release enhancements build upon the industry-leading product capabilities and enables service providers to optimize their systems and manage their customer and partner relationships for profitability.

Availability and Pricing
Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management Release 7.3 is generally available. Pricing is on a per-subscriber basis. Terms, conditions and restrictions apply.