By Monica Alleven
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
You might say Oracle is the 800-pound gorilla that wants to help operators remain relevant in a world full of another kind of 800-pound gorilla, those being the Googles and Yahoo!s of the world.
Oracle today announced the availability of Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper 4.0, a standards-based environment for automated partner management, network protection and application access control.
The product is designed to help service providers deal with third-party content and applications partners – bringing the “cool” applications together with the service provider. Gatekeeper 4.0 automates the process and provides a set of developer tools, allowing third-party partners to access service providers’ network capabilities to create new, innovative services. And if that sounds the least bit threatening to operators, rest assured that security and control measures are in place, according to Oracle. Part of the reason the product is called “Gatekeeper” is it allows a service provider to enforce its rules and policies.
Wireless carriers possess two key things that other “gorillas” don’t have: an existing revenue relationship with customers for services not related to advertising and profile information about customers, according to Ty Wang, director of product management for Oracle Communications. “It is really being relevant and right now, the carriers aren’t seen as particularly relevant” in the eyes of a Facebook or Google developer, and that needs to change, he said. “We are enabling that transformation so they can be relevant.”
With the acquisition of BEA, Oracle considers itself the one place that can perform the greatest level of integration. “We are the 800-pound gorilla … in this space now,” he said.
The company has been bringing independent software vendors (ISVs) and developers together with operators at events around the world, the most recent one being this week in Hong Kong. Telecom Italia was one of the first operators to use Services Gatekeeper for exposure to third parties.