Oracle buys Net4Call: the SDP component buying bonanza

Jean-Charles Doineau, Service Infrastructure Practice Leader

Oracle has bought Net4Call, a Norwegian company specialising in the Parlay gateway market, as part of its ongoing effort to productise telecoms service delivery platforms (SDPs).

This acquisition complements Oracle's service delivery strategy in the network mediation space. Following its acquisitions of Portal Software and of Hotsip, Oracle is now able to offer a 'productised' SDP and an end-to-end portfolio.

SDP is currently a buzzword in the industry. It basically means the IT 'plumbing' that enables abstract service provisioning and effective independence from network equipment, in order to a) enable easier service development capabilities and b) enable provisioning of third-party services throughout the SDP in service providers' IT environments.

Over the past few years, many service providers have taken holistic approaches to designing SDPs and selecting the corresponding pieces of software that act as enablers for them. Some vendors have developed a comprehensive approach to this market, the most prominent in the IT area being IBM and Microsoft. With this acquisition, Oracle complements its software portfolio and is now able to address virtually all the SDP components with its own software building blocks. SDP is something worth productising, as the market is potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

So far, the opportunities have been more about driving revenues at an SI level than at a software level, as service providers deploying these IT environments have been specifying them from A to Z. This is due to the heterogeneity of service providers' network and billing mediation requirements. Will Oracle be able to productise all this in an integrated software portfolio, and will service providers follow that path in designing their solutions? If so, it would mean a dramatic change for the industry.

Jean-Charles leads Ovum's Service Infrastructure research practice, which focuses on the applications market that enables service provisioning in the telecoms space. His responsibilities include managing and providing guidance to the Service Infrastructure team, as well as delivering research and engagements on the service infrastructure markets.