Oracle Introduces Oracle® Communications Unified Inventory Management

Oracle today introduced Oracle(r) Communications Unified Inventory Management, a new standards-based inventory management application that will provide communications service providers with a real-time, unified view of customer, service and resource inventory. This new application will enable service providers to rapidly introduce and deliver customer-centric, next-generation services; improve the financial control and compliance related to their infrastructures; and deploy and manage network resources in an optimized, cost-effective manner.

“As operators deliver next-generation IP services across an expanding number of channels, they require a unified customer view across all services, as well as underlying network and IT resources,” said Bhaskar Gorti, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Communications. “Oracle Communications Unified Inventory Management will offer service providers a lower-risk and highly efficient solution to deliver customer-centric, next-generation services and is yet further evidence of Oracle’s strategy to provide the communications industry’s most complete, modern and standards-based suite of integrated applications.”

Meeting Customer Needs for Unified Inventory Management
Communications service providers traditionally use a variety of inventory management systems to manage physical (e.g., switches, routers, fibers, racks, etc.) and logical (e.g., phone numbers, IP addresses, etc.) resources across their various services. Today, many service providers have multiple inventory sources to support a number of business processes, including network engineering, service fulfillment and financial management - resulting in data inaccuracy and inconsistency across potentially disparate systems. As service providers deliver increasingly bundled services over a converging network, such siloed inventory systems are an impediment to both rapid service delivery and integrated network management Oracle Communications Unified Inventory Management allows service providers to access a unified view of customer, service and network asset data through integration without forcing system consolidation or jeopardizing data integrity. Furthermore, the application provides significant modularity and flexibility, allowing service providers to deploy it to support specific business challenges (such as those involved in next-generation services) or across their entire network and service portfolio.

As the industry continues to evolve to include non-traditional providers, a host of new IP-based services - such as instant-messaging and video chat - require increased personalization. Traditional network-focused inventory management systems provide a view of network assets without accurately or flexibly relating them to specific customers or services. Oracle Communications Unified Inventory Management is a customer-centric inventory management system that provides visibility into how each customer consumes resources across multiple services and networks.

Supporting Automated End-to-End Communications Business Processes
Oracle Communications Unified Inventory Management - in conjunction with Oracle’s complementary suite of end-to-end applications for the communications industry - will provide trusted inventory information to support a number of communications business processes and priorities, including:

* Financial control and compliance with Oracle E-Business Suite - accurately integrating the physical asset lifecycle management process between network inventory and financial management, supply chain and asset tracking systems, which is increasingly critical for compliance with various regulations including Sarbanes-Oxley
* Service fulfillment with Oracle’s Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) through to Oracle Communications Service Activation - enabling service providers to efficiently capture and manage customer orders, assign appropriate network resources and activate services - helping to ensure rapid and accurate service delivery throughout the entire fulfillment cycle
* Network planning, engineering and optimization with Oracle Communications Network Intelligence - gained through Oracle’s recent acquisition of Netsure Telecom Limited; will enable service providers to more effectively analyze their inventory data to improve proactive network planning, modeling and optimization

“Today’s regulatory environment places heightened emphasis on accurate alignment of inventory with financial reporting,” said Ari Banerjee, program manager at Yankee Group. “This announcement of Oracle Communications Unified Network Inventory, in conjunction with Oracle’s existing E-Business Suite for financial management, uniquely positions Oracle as the only solutions provider with all the end-to-end capabilities in-house in the market today.”

Contemporary, Open, Standards-Based Architecture
Oracle Communications Unified Inventory Management will be built on a contemporary architecture with a data model based on the TeleManagement Forum’s Shared Information/Data Model (SID), a standard providing the communications industry with a common vocabulary and set of definitions for next-generation operations support system (NGOSS) architectures. This enables powerful and flexible modeling of customers, services and resources, helping to provide interoperable solutions through the common and consistent use of standards-based information models.

“With the introduction of Oracle Communications Unified Inventory Management, Oracle will deliver one of the first industry inventory applications natively based on the industry standard TM Forum SID data model,” said Martin Creaner, president and chief technology officer, TM Forum. “Oracle has been a key supporter and contributor to numerous TM Forum standards initiatives. With this product commitment to TM Forum standards, Oracle is clearly showing leadership in adopting and implementing a standards-based approach to commercial-off-the-shelf products for the communications industry.”

Oracle Communications Unified Inventory Management will be part of Oracle’s best-in-class, integrated, open and standards-based Communications applications and infrastructure software including Oracle’s Siebel CRM, Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management, Oracle Communications Service Fulfillment Suite, Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Service Delivery Platform and Oracle Database.