As vice president responsible for Oracle's business success in the EMEA telecommunications sector, I would like to welcome you to this new, telco-focused section of the ISV newsletter.

This is an exciting time for Oracle's telco business in EMEA, and our ISV partners are an integral part of our success in this space. Oracle has a large installed base in the EMEA telco industry, with database installations in most of the major national carriers, as well as in newer entrants in deregulated markets. Our acquisition of Siebel, meanwhile, means that Oracle is also now the leading provider of customer interaction applications in this sector.

ISV Partners Needed

However, our verticalised applications for this sector are limited, and a crucial part of our strategy is to partner with vendors of telecommunications industry-specific applications that allow telco providers to leverage their existing investment in Oracle Database, and which complement the horizontal Oracle Applications already in use.

Areas in which we have established strong ISV partnerships include billing, provisioning, mediation, service activation and delivery, and the entire gamut of BSS and OSS systems. If you have an application in any of these areas, we are very interested to hear from you.

From Product Focus to Customer Focus

The telco industry is undergoing a major strategic re-orientation at the moment, with the focus moving away from individual networks and services and towards treating the customer as a holistic entity.

With the range of consumer and business services widening - into broadband, 3G, mobile, multimedia content and television - and overlapping, telcos need to overhaul their customer relationships to ensure that each individual customer receives consistent service and information regardless of which service they are using or enquiring about.

Oracle is helping telco applications providers to help their end users make this transition by enabling a single source of customer data - based on the powerful, scalable, reliable, secure and highly available Oracle Database - and a single customer data model, using Oracle Customer Data Hub. ISVs can take advantage of both Oracle products to deliver high-performance, reliable applications that use the same customer data schema as other Oracle and third-party applications already in the end customer's technology infrastructure. We are already working with the major billings system vendors - Intec, Convergys, Portal and CSG - to harmonise their customer data model on the Oracle schema.

Add to that Oracle Fusion Middleware, a comprehensive, standards-based application development, integration and Web deployment environment, and the choice of Oracle allows ISVs to concentrate on their core competency - delivering the applications that will really make a difference to telecoms providers' business - without worrying about the underlying technology infrastructure.

Defining Tomorrow's Standards

Oracle's position as a strategic technology provider to the telecommunications industry is further illustrated by our close involvement with leading standards organisations and movements. We are currently working with a number of organisations, including the Service Availability Forum and the Open Mobile Architecture initiative, to define the data architecture that will enable telcos to deliver profitable next-generation services to satisfied and loyal customers.

Contact Us Today

If you are interested in learning more about Oracle's technology offerings, communications industry strategy and/or ISV partner programmes, please contact your local Oracle PartnerNetwork Interaction Center in the first instance. We have ISV partner teams in every country who are empowered to recruit partners locally. No matter what size your company, if we feel there is a good fit between our business and yours, we can work together to define and execute joint marketing and sales initiatives to boost your business and ours in this very promising sector.

I look forward to working with you.

Lars Wahlstrom
Vice President, Communications and Media Industries, Oracle EMEA