Oracle (News - Alert) Communication recently introduced the Oracle Communications Unified Inventory Management (UIM), a new standards-based inventory management application that provides communications service providers, carirers and network operators with a real-time, unified view of customer, service and resource inventory. This new application will enable service providers to rapidly introduce and deliver customer-centric, next-generation services; improve the financial control and compliance related to their infrastructures; and deploy and manage network resources in an optimized, cost-effective manner.
David Sharpley, Vice President, Product Marketing and Channels, Oracle, says, “Our new Unified Inventory Management [UIM] product has been on our development drawing board for well over two years, and I’d say closer to three years. This inventory system and how we’re approaching the market is different on a couple of fronts. First, it was architected from the ground up using an open standards-based architecture. So it is the first inventory product to be architected using what’s called the Shared Information/Data [SID] model from the Telemanagement Forum [www.tmforum.com]. That Shared Information/Data model is a common representation of key objects and their attributes, so things such as customers, service and so forth can then be leveraged across the organization as well as be integrated. SID is standards-based.”
“Also, consistent with Oracle’s strategy in the development of our applications suite,” says Sharpley, “it is very open. And when we say open, what we mean is this whole thing is exposed and is architected from the ground up using a Services-Oriented Architecture (SoA), which can then enable the use of that data through a variety of different systems. That’s just the first thing as to how the product was architected.”
“Secondly, there’s the approach in terms of the data management,” says Sharpley, “which is also unique. Many of our competitors started out by saying they had to migrate all of the data into their system, and then they can leverage that into the inventory management systems. The Oracle approach is different in that we want you, the service provider, to be able to leverage the data that may exist in a variety of different systems in your network today, yet use the unified inventory management and ‘unify’ that data as well as aggregate and enhance it, to provide a single view of the customer, or a single view of the service, and allow for things such as rapid service bundling. So, instead of recreating and/or migrating data from one legacy system into the new platform, it’s really about wrapping and copying the existing data that sits there and exposing it in a contemporary, architecturally-friendly way.”
“You can look at it as a kind of funnel,” says Sharpley, “A lot of the other approaches are something like this: in order to leverage that data, you need to migrate data from your legacy system into the new system. And we ask, ‘Why would you want to migrate data on broadband, for example? The broadband system is working fine and it’s not going anywhere. What’s the business case of taking everyone’s broadband network subscriber and service data and putting that into a new system?’ It’s a major cost. The business case is likely not there. What you need to do is to take that broadband information, allow that to be exposed through our UIM, which then leverages that as you go and build quad-play bundles and so forth, that utilizes that broadband information.”
“The third thing which makes our Unified Inventory Management system unique,” says Sharpley, “is that we approach it not just from a network, physical perspective, but also from a logical view, taking in such things that are increasingly important, such as IP addresses, SIM cards, telephone numbers and so forth. Not just the physical equipment, but the logical as well as the customer and the service data. And the reason why that’s important is that it’s really about how you manage the customer and the services. From an Oracle perspective, what makes us unique is that we can then leverage that information with other systems within Oracle. For example, integration with Customer Relationship Management [CRM] to have a detailed view on the customer and what services are required to substantiate that customer service through the integration of true UIM.”
“Very similarly, we can take our physical network information and then integrate that as part of our Enterprise Resource Planning [ERP] and management, so that you can do things such as asset tracking, procurement, and financial management of all the assets that sit in the network, which is important because you’ve got CFOs that now need to certify processes in place. The integration of our inventory with our ERP is really unique because we’re the only ones in the marketplace that can really tie in the entire network lifecycle from planning through to procurement, through asset management and the use of equipment and facilities in the network, and then even the financial depreciation of them.”
“To summarize,” says Sharpley, “our new Unified Inventory Management system for service providers is open and standards-based. It looks at the different layers in terms of a functional view of inventory. And clearly the key differentiator for us at Oracle is the ability to integrate both our CRM and ERP capabilities to provide operators with a complete lifecycle.”
Rejeev Tankha, Director of Product and Solutions Marketing at Oracle, says, “The reason we call it ‘unified’ is that first, most inventory, as you probably are aware, has been focused purely on the physical aspects of the network. Take the stories of how inventories have been traditionally approached by network operators. They consolidate all the data and every time there’s a new technology coming in, everyone says, ‘This is the last system we need to install’. But it isn’t and in any case you end up with various silos. If you look at large operators such as BT, AT&T (News - Alert), Telstra or China Telecom, they have literally hundreds of silos and databases of different inventories. The standard parts services have their own inventories, and they’re not going to change that, whether you like it or not. As vendors of software, most say, ‘let’s consolidate,’ so our competitors, such as the big names in the inventory business, have all taken the approach of wanting to consolidate everything into a single mega-inventory. It never actually works, of course, even though millions of dollars has been spent on the idea. That’s one of the key challenges folks are facing; as the requirements have shifted away from a connection-based world to a connectionless world, such as managing an IP infrastructure.”
“As a product is architected and designed to manage a physical network,” says Tankha, “it becomes extremely difficult to be able to manage an IP infrastructure, where the rules of information are different. That’s what David was talking about, a common information model. We’ve approached these operators and we’ve said, ‘Look, we’re talking about unification at three levels. First we unify services across the network and give providers a customer-centric view of services. They want us to map customers to particular services and deliver those services in the future. When carriers are creating commercial services in the CRM field, and they talk about providing 360-degree views of the customer – most traditional inventory systems actually give you views of the network and not the service. How is that pretty good service associated with the customer? What are the resources allocated to that service? That’s one way of looking at it. And that’s where most people are struggling today. Operators are launching IPTV services, and more and more consumer-based items. So that’s one key problem that most carriers face.”
“The second part is this concept of consolidation and integration,” says Tankha, “What we’re saying should be taken as a guide. We understand that there are systems which may be old, but they do continue to work. Trying to change-over a parts inventory system is not going to work. So, our objective is to create a common information model; to be able to pull in data from any source that may exist and to make it available to any user. That user could be in network engineering, or the user could be somebody in the marketing group who needs to have a customer-centric view. Or it could be a CFO for managing and tracking the supply-chain and financials, and so forth. These people need to have the same information anywhere whenever they need it. Our objective is to bring in the data from wherever it is, have a trusted source of information, and then make that available to whoever wants it wherever they are. That’s the key thing.”
“The third part is, in adding on all of this stuff, we need to be able to bring to bear additional capabilities such as intelligence and analytics, so you can do forecasting and planning for the future,” says Tankha. “We are able to bring all of this together into one solution, and that’s where we are different from other solutions. Most carriers today are asking not for consolidation, but for integration. We have the answer for them. Carriers are saying ‘I want to have service views of the customer, rather than network views’. We are able to do that. And the third item is the integration of processes – and Inventory fits right bang in the center of these things. Those processes could be deploying a network, or doing full-asset tracking in management, in the full life cycle from deploying the network to upgrading it to maintaining it, to retiring a particular asset, and that information needs to be made available across the whole network. We do that. We can deal with service provisioning. And of course the final area is financial control and compliance with such things as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act or the European Union directives. That’s not a new concept – but the point is that nobody’s been able to do all of it. It’s a frontier between inventory and financial systems.”
“But by being able to define the integration point and the various processes for financial compliance,” says Tankha, “we’re able to deliver a single-source solution to customers, that gives you a single view over everything. That what we mean by ‘unification.’”
So, it appears that Oracle’s next-gen Unified Inventory Management solution is indeed different from SAP (News - Alert) or other competitors thanks to its comprehensive network lifecycle management and compliance capabilities.
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