development and launch, an approach that can often consume as much as 18 months—a veritable lifetime in today’s marketplace.

The complexities can be staggering. “There are so many questions facing service providers,” says Oracle senior director of product marketing Ty Wang, reeling off a string of examples. “‘I own the network, but how do I evolve it? I hear about IP lowering my opex, but how do I do that? Can I put something on top of my existing network assets to get more out of it? Can I put together a set of applications to better manage my network assets? And because all of my assets operate differently, can I put together a platform to span multiple networks and be more intelligent to manage capacity?’ We have the answers to these questions”—in short, the communications industry’s most complete, cutting-edge and standards-based suite of integrated applications.

Launching new services is only half the battle, of course—managing them is another. Operators traditionally employ a variety of inventory management systems to manage both physical (e.g., switches, routers, fibers and racks) and logical (like phone numbers and IP addresses) resources across various services, translating to multiple inventory sources that support a number of business processes including network engineering, service fulfillment and financial management.

The end result: Data inaccuracy and inconsistency across disparate, siloed inventory systems, presenting an enormous impediment to both rapid service delivery and integrated network management as providers look to deliver bundled services.

And if the challenges of network management seem enormous now, just consider the obstacles ahead. Traditional network-focused inventory management systems typically fail to accurately or flexibly relate network assets to specific customers or services, but as the communications industry continues its evolution toward a more integrated, IP-based model, next-gen services like instant messaging and video chat will require even greater levels of personalization, demanding customer-centric inventory management systems that provide visibility into how each subscriber consumes resources across multiple services and networks.

“It’s very manually intensive to manage complex services and networks,” says Oracle senior director of product marketing Leonard Sheahan. “It’s often a laborious, error-prone process. Better managing and streamlining the delivery of services can help carriers grow their revenue margins.”

THE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION of more effective network supervision lies in Oracle’s Communications