Global Telecom CEO: Rather than the old approach of building networks and systems and hoping users and revenues will result, are operators starting to have an increased emphasis on first having a business case‾
Bhaskar Gorti: It's not about network speeds and feeds but rather services. Operators are looking to be creative and innovative and get new services to market quickly. As a result, when they focus at the service layer to drive incremental revenue, they are more likely to proceed without a full-blown and approved business case. When it comes to major network deployments and expansions, rarely does this proceed without a conscious and approved business case.
What's the driver behind the planned acquisition of Netsure‾
Our strategy is to provide increased value to customers through enhanced business intelligence and analytics. We see network intelligence as a large growth market that is underserved by software vendors. Netsure, coupled with our inventory solutions, presents a great market opportunity and broadens Oracle's communications portfolio for telecoms.
Are carriers looking for network intelligence and analytics systems from the vendors that provide OSS and ERP systems‾
Yes, the network intelligence and analytics systems require fundamental data from OSS and ERP for them to unleash their value. We are seeing strong complementarities and a much higher value proposition when we position these applications together.
Network intelligence is a natural complement to and differentiates our current product portfolio. We aim to help bridge the gap between ERP and OSS systems to ensure accurate data integrity and intelligence between these two key functions. Ensuring ERP financial and asset data is aligned with what exists in inventory systems is a key challenge for service providers.
Is it fair to say carriers will become valued as much on the services they offer and how they deliver them as they are on the investments they have made in network assets‾
Increasingly so - while the networks are critical and a fundamental part of the service, we see service providers rapidly moving to offer new, value-added, content and media services in an attempt to offer increased value to customers.
This increases their competitiveness, retains customers and improves overall customer satisfaction. As service providers move further up the value chain, this puts increasing pressure on ensuring that the systems in place are configurable and flexible to support such innovative, next-gen services.
Now that next-generation build-outs are well underway, do you agree that top management finally understands the operational importance of OSS/BSS‾
I believe that service providers, on a global scale, are increasingly recognizing that having a flexible, product-based BSS and OSS systems infrastructure is critical to their market success. They understand they need to be able to bring services to market quickly to obtain a return on their substantial, next-generation network investment.
This shift gives us the opportunity to offer operators a comprehensive set of communications applications backed by productized integration across mission-critical business processes.
What can we expect from Oracle in the terms of telecom management software in the next few years‾
Our strategy in communications is sharply tuned to position Oracle to provide increased strategic value and lower risk to our customers - enabling them to shape their business to meet the needs of their customers today and into the future.
We are increasing the level of productization, so service providers can achieve faster time-to-market through configuration of our products and lower total cost of ownership.