M2Mi’s Network Virtualization application needed to be able to adapt to customers’ environments and best practices rather than force specific policies, processes, or architectures on them. In addition, the company’s customer environments are comprised of an extremely heterogeneous mix of commercial and custom-built applications. Knitting these together while trying to scale would have impeded M2Mi’s growth and competitive advantage.

The extensibility and built-in support of Oracle SOA Suite, along with Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Database 11g, enabled M2Mi focus on its core business—expanding the reach of its Network Virtualization application, which is designed to streamline and transform network and security assets from brittle, manual, and static devices into a single, dynamic, responsive resource that can be provisioned through high-level policies and rules.

“We need top-notch stability and accountability. We can’t have any crashes. Our application must be self tuning, and we achieve that with Oracle Fusion Middleware,” said William Bathurst, director of development, Machine-to-Machine Intelligence.

M2Mi’s application exposes services that must integrate with customers’ management infrastructures, regardless of the technology platforms they use. Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle WebLogic Server provide the open integration capabilities the company needs to easily integrate its solution into its customers’ datacenters.

This approach enables M2Mi’s customers to more easily deploy new technologies in their datacenters with minimal integration and new skills training, because the features can be virtualized alongside the existing architecture and aligned to existing business rules. The interoperability of multivendor virtualization and automation relieves organizations from vendor lock-in, makes network management much less complex, and enables organizations to easily assimilate acquired datacenters with different vendors, operating systems, and appliances.

“We are involved in projects where we essentially are talking to hundreds of thousands of devices. To scale to that degree is quite challenging. Our WebLogic clusters enable us to push transactions from one geographically-dispersed cluster to another to handle the load and enable us to scale,” Bathurst said.

Leveraging Oracle Fusion Middleware, M2Mi’s Network Virtualization application helps its customers manage the complexity and diversity found in their networks. As a result, the company’s customers have been able to reduce the time it takes to provision new users from weeks to minutes or hours. They can also more easily deliver new applications with a simple, on-boarding tool. Furthermore, the virtualization of these feature-rich assets into deliverable and measurable services allows for the monetization of network and security assets through value-added services, like service level agreements, advanced security features, and compliance monitoring.

“M2Mi is the only comprehensive network virtualization tool on the market with extensive multivendor support, true network and security virtualization, advanced features, and a proven track record with large, enterprise cloud, public cloud, and telecommunications deployments. Our aggressive technology development—which enabled us to get ahead of the market—was definitely enabled by Oracle’s platform,” said Sarah Cooper, vice president business development, Machine-to-Machine Intelligence Corporation.

“Our solution is also the first to connect the cloud to mobile and machine-to-machine assets by bridging the datacenter or Ethernet network and the telecommunications operator network. Open-standards-based Oracle Fusion Middleware helps us close that gap,” Cooper continued.

With M2Mi’s Network Virtualization solution—built on Oracle—its customers can realize revenue much more quickly, in eight hours versus in 28 days, due to more rapid deployments. In addition, its customers—many of whom are in the telecommunications industry—have been able to eliminate months of end user, on-boarding backlogs within weeks to retain the pipeline and bring in new revenue. The company has enabled its customers to reduce average provisioning costs by 76%.

M2Mi’s solution also helps its customers reduce the errors that plague the manual workflows previously used to administer the network and security, resulting in less downtime, and through the extensibility of Oracle SOA Suite, standardize the entire organization on network and security best practices.

“We have achieved a 260% return on our Oracle investment, based on our current number of users,” Cooper said. “In addition, we have greatly reduced the risk for future projects, due to Oracle’s standardized architecture and processes.”

M2Mi is currently developing Network Virtualization Version 5, which will be further optimized on Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle WebLogic Server. In addition, it will build out full integration for orchestrated network virtualization and provisioning with Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Virtual Machine. Following its delivery of full Oracle Enterprise Manager support, M2Mi will push Network Virtualization V5 to existing enterprise and telecommunications customers, followed by release through channel partners in the US, Europe, and Asia.

“We will depend upon Oracle products for enhanced security functionality and scalability as we expand to cover more and more devices. The ability to expose services and apply business security rules to them is important to us. Oracle provides all of these functionalities, out of the box,” Cooper said.

The company also intends to integrate its solution with several new technologies, including a quantum key generator and encrypted information exchange services for mobile devices. M2Mi’s customers will be able to take advantage of these newly supported devices with much reduced integration and deployment timelines and costs, thanks in part to Oracle Fusion Middleware.