Airwave Innovation
Continued
Innovating with Oracle
When SIRIUS was founded in 2001, its IT backbone was almost entirely a standardized Oracle product line: Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management, Oracle Database, Oracle WebLogic Suite, and Oracle E-Business Suite. “As our business matured and as our understanding of the technology matured, we began to extend from the core,” Pratt says. “We continued to use the billing and revenue management core, and then we built extensions using the API set.” The SIRIUS XM approach to IT innovation is to find ways to build upon the power found within the company’s Oracle assets.
Pratt says that keeping systems with Oracle and on a standard configuration led to efficiency from the start. “It allowed us to avoid significant capital investments at the early stages. It allowed us to invest as we could afford to while our business continued to grow.”
It also made for reduced error rates. “We work very hard to
minimize transactional errors and eliminate rework. With billions of transactions, we cannot afford to handle transactions more than once. The scale of this business demands standardization of business processes and transactions,” Pratt says.
“We try to avoid workaround processes or one-off solutions because we know that they will not sustain high transaction volumes,” notes Pratt. One example of SIRIUS XM’s standard configuration components is the Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management solution. It operates at nearly 100 percent uptime and supports a range of multiple billing options, including one-time and recurring payment plans using credit cards, invoice, and gift card payments on a single system that is fully integrated with SIRIUS XM’s self-service Web sites and its customer service center. Pratt says that the standardization doesn’t limit IT innovation. If anything, it improves it. “We’re leveraging the capabilities that Oracle has
provided in its packages,” he says. “Oracle’s products have allowed us to support different promotional and sponsorship programs offered by our auto company partners, including free trial periods offered to purchasers of certain vehicle models.”
Prior to the acquisition in July 2008, XM was also using Oracle software, and Pratt predicts that will make for a smooth integration. “We can scale the platform,” he says. “I am confident that Oracle’s product will allow us to scale the IT portfolio from 9 million subscribers
to well beyond 20 million.”
The Merger and Beyond
SIRIUS XM is currently merging the IT infrastructure of its two constituent parts. Pratt says that Oracle’s applications and technologies will continue to be at the core of SIRIUS XM’s IT portfolio. Both companies used Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management, and
the merged company is working on consolidating onto a single billing and revenue management database. Similarly, Pratt’s objective is to merge the two companies’ Oracle databases. “We have been very pleased with the support we
get from Oracle’s application teams and the scalability of their solutions.”
Both SIRIUS and XM were formed out of an innovative idea: that it would be possible for people on the road to start up their favorite tunes no matter where they happened to be driving. For the last seven years, SIRIUS has added programs, technology, and services to build on this idea. Pratt says that the fast growth could not have happened without a strong Oracle system that the company could use to meet its changing needs.
SIRIUS XM will keep innovating to find new ways to give customers the entertainment and information that they want, to leverage its core set of IT applications and technologies, and to improve the company’s cost profile. “Acting in concert with the business, innovation around these three objectives becomes natural,” Pratt says.
For More Information
Oracle Communications Applications
Ann C. Logue writes frequently for
Profit and is based in Chicago, Illinois.
