Operating complex networks to serve millions of subscribers is a constant challenge. From day-to-day operations and expansion to new technology and standards, the telco world is about reinventing yourself every day. Telcos need to constantly strive for greater efficiencies, reduced costs, new sources of revenue, and new ways to provide customers with the best possible experience.
But it’s also about data – and lots of it. Voice is a commodity and data is king. Customers are growing ever more distributed and data-rich with 5G, mobile, and IoT. Global businesses are increasingly making product and service decisions regionally, locally, and often, exactly where the customer happens to be. Governments and citizens want to keep their data and applications in-country and within sovereign borders. To support the changing landscape around data, you need to derive insight from it, secure it, get closer to it, and offer new services for consumers and enterprises. Telcos have to digitally transform to enable higher impact business outcomes, deliver insight-driven “digital” ecosystems and execute agile business models with flexibility.
Telecommunications is in Oracle’s DNA. With decades of experience working with global telcos to support their critical data systems, applications, and network operations, we understand the journey you’re on. We know the challenges of distributed workloads, regional and industry compliance, big data, and hyperscale environments. We believe that together, we can provide an exceptional customer experience and drive new opportunities for growth. We’ve already started with key partners like TIM (Telecom Italia), Bharti Airtel, and Telefonica Espana.
We are excited to announce Oracle Cloud for Telcos.
Oracle Cloud for Telcos is a comprehensive set of cloud solutions built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). OCI is a cloud platform available around the world in 36 public cloud regions, as well as in a distributed cloud architecture. The OCI platform runs Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite, Oracle Communications core network and B/OSS solutions, and more than 60 other industry application suites, as well as third-party and custom applications and workloads. It enables telcos to build new applications or modernize existing workloads with 80 plus cloud services, including data management, developer services, analytics, and artificial intelligence.
Oracle Cloud for Telcos enables any telecommunications provider to become more agile, reduce capital expenditures and operating costs, and establish a flexible foundation for innovation. Telcos can:
- Modernize their Enterprise IT and OSS/BSS in the cloud, improving performance by more than 50 percent and reducing costs by as much as 60 percent
- Gain insights across all Telco IT, network, and edge data for greater efficiency and new revenue
- Run their core and edge networks as cloud-native services, reducing CAPEX and increasing agility
- Run their IT, network, and new services on a distributed cloud architecture, combining OCI’s innovative hybrid cloud technologies with the Telco’s broad customer reach
- Generate net new revenue streams by creating and/or serving next generation applications
Let’s walk through the five solutions in more detail.
Run any IT and OSS/BSS application 50 percent faster, for less
Oracle Cloud for Telcos has key innovations that make it easy to migrate and run the most critical IT and OSS/BSS applications, including Oracle, third-party, or custom applications. Oracle Cloud provides the database clustering and massive I/O necessary to maintain near-zero downtime environments while improving performance 50 percent or more over on-premises or other clouds. We have proven scale, as recently demonstrated by benchmarking Oracle’s Cloud Scale Charging to 100 million subscribers. Oracle also offers Monetization, Orchestration, and Customer Experience in nearly all our public cloud locations. Our interconnection partnership with Microsoft Azure enables our customers to run workloads across the two clouds with federated identity and only 2-millisecond latency, offering even more flexibility. Whether you’re migrating existing apps, converting to SaaS, or require a multi-cloud or hybrid architecture, Oracle Cloud for Telcos can help, with the most competitive pricing in the cloud.
TIM Brasil, a large Brazilian mobile provider, had a goal to improve their customer support and dramatically reduce their carbon emissions by moving 100 percent of their workloads to the cloud. They chose Oracle Cloud for Telcos and Microsoft Azure for a multi-cloud strategy. TIM Brasil is moving their core billing and operational systems, including third-party, custom, and Oracle applications, as well as a 4,000 server VMware environment hosting hundreds of other applications, to Oracle Cloud.
Transform customer experience and operations with data and AI
Many telco customers already have their customer records and transactions in Oracle Databases and Oracle Applications. Oracle Cloud for Telcos makes it easy to integrate this data, or data from nearly any source, with less structured data like IoT, images, logs, and more in a cloud data lakehouse. From there, data can be processed by cloud data services like Apache Spark (OCI Data Flow), Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, or MySQL Heatwave, optimized by services like Data Science or an AI service like OCI Language (text processing), and visualized by Oracle Analytics or third-party analytics. All this technology is available on-demand to help you understand the customer and operational patterns and gain valuable insights to reduce customer churn, predict network congestion, or provide preventative maintenance.
Safaricom, the largest Kenyan telco, had significant overhead in their outsourcing process, costing them millions of dollars. They used Oracle Cloud for Telcos to integrate data from their Oracle Fusion Supply Chain Management and other sources into Autonomous Data Warehouse. Oracle Analytics, with its built-in machine learning, helped Safaricom identify patterns to improve supplier negotiations and accelerate tender contract renewals.
Efficiently operate, control, and differentiate network services
Oracle Cloud for Telcos offers Oracle Communications’ best-in-class cloud-native 5G core solutions across policy and charging, signaling and routing, and networks analytics and automation. These cloud-native services can be run on many-core or edge environments and they can interoperate with other third-party core network functions on the Oracle Cloud. Oracle Communications Session Border Controller (SBC) on Oracle Cloud is the ideal choice for telcos as they evolve their networks toward 5G and cloud. It helps operators deliver trusted, carrier-grade, real-time communications for the next generation of consumer and enterprise applications.
Our public cloud is already in 36 locations around the world – with a plan for 44 by the end of 2022 – the fastest expansion of any hyperscale cloud provider. This means low latency access for more customers and more data that is retained in specific countries. High-speed access to the regions is available publicly or privately through over 50 network providers, at 1/4 the cost of other cloud providers. Within cloud regions, we offer consistent low latency – less than 100μs one-way latency between hosts and less than 500μs between Availability Domains – with a highly flexible range of runtime environments for maximum utilization and horizontal and vertical scaling. This includes bare metal, burstable and flexible VMs, Kubernetes managed containers, and functions as a service. We also offer Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS), which allows you to create and manage VMware-enabled software-defined data centers (SDDCs) in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
BT, the largest provider of mobile and broadband in the UK, selected Oracle for its overall 5G readiness, product maturity, and competitive strengths. BT is leveraging Oracle’s cloud-native 5G core solution. This includes Oracle Communications Cloud-Native Converged Policy Management to optimize its network resources and being new 5G offerings to market.
Run IT, network, and edge services on a distributed cloud architecture
Acquiring cloud service capabilities has been relatively straightforward for telcos. If they want a service, they would either have to stand it up themselves on their own hardware (e.g., Red Hat OpenShift), or they would be tethered to a public cloud for the service (e.g., AWS Outposts). Oracle Cloud for Telcos redefines the market. In addition to our public cloud regions, we offer entire cloud stacks – inclusive of hardware, scaling, refresh, patches, and upgrades – in an OPEX model. Our Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer offers all 80 plus OCI services, including future services, in this model. Additionally, the cloud control plane resides with the customer. Dedicated Regions are not tethered to our public cloud and all data and metadata stay within a telco customer’s environment for the highest degree of control in the market. Dedicated Regions can meet the needs of core or regional data centers in a brand new way.
Oracle Cloud for Telcos also offers additional form factors, which can support near and far edge deployments. Exadata Cloud@Customer offers the highest performance Oracle Databases as a service that customers can deploy anywhere. We also offer rack-scale compute and storage with Private Cloud Appliances, and Roving Edge Infrastructure enables remote deployment of compute and storage services as single nodes or clusters of up to 15 nodes. The combination of these offerings provides telcos with a very flexible distributed cloud capable of running a wide range of operational workloads: from Enterprise IT and OSS/BSS to 4G/5G network functions to edge services such as video analytics, and ML inferencing. The distributed cloud promises to provide end-to-end policy and control over applications and infrastructure from core to edge.
Entel, the largest Chilean telco, had a goal to shut down all their IT data centers. They were able to meet that goal with Oracle Cloud for Telcos. They moved the bulk of their OSS/BSS and enterprise applications, including Oracle and third-party applications, to OCI public cloud regions in Chile and Brazil, saving 50 percent compared to their own data centers and dramatically improving customer support. They moved most of their databases to Exadata Cloud@Customer, improving performance by 300 percent and shifting database management to Oracle.
Create and serve next-generation applications
Our fifth solution area enables telcos to take advantage of new revenue-generating opportunities created by 5G and other network innovations. Oracle Cloud for Telcos provides developer-friendly infrastructure and services so enterprise customers and ISV partners can more easily build, deploy and manage next-generation applications that need to leverage the telco network. With the core, near the edge, and far edge presence and developer services like CI/CD, source code management, ML model creation, training, and management, pre-built AI services for analyzing text, speech, images, and anomalies, and container, function, and API deployment and management, telcos have everything they need to enhance their application development and hosting capabilities. This powerful combination of Oracle’s developer services and the telco’s “everywhere” presence provides the agile environment to host and scale today’s applications while futureproofing for applications that we haven’t even imagined.
Get started with Oracle Cloud for Telcos
Of course, each of these powerful telco solutions is backed by Oracle Cloud’s strong SLAs, available through our flexible Universal Credits plan, and supported through our no-cost Oracle Cloud Lift program. Cloud Lift provides Oracle experts to help you, architect, migrate and run your workloads on Oracle Cloud, as well as get your staff and system integrators trained and ready for go-live.
We’re excited to announce Oracle Cloud for Telcos, to provide operators the ability to gain operational efficiencies, create better customer experiences and take advantage of new revenue-generating opportunities. We look forward to expanding our partnership with the world’s leading communications companies.
By Clay Magouyrk
