“Internally all telcos in India are ready to shift to SIP from TDM”
Amit Bishnoi, Senior Director, APAC, Oracle Communications elaborates on Oracle CGBU’s focus on SIP adoption and how Indian BPOs and telcos are responding.
How many Global Business Units (GBUs) are there within Oracle?
Everyone remember about the Oracle database or the SUN and other CRM acquisitions that we have done, but very few know about what we call as Global Business Units. What is a GBU? It’s like a separate entity, has its own P&L, has its own General Manager, has its own R&D and stuff like that; and we have seven such GBUs. There is the retail GBU, Communications GBU, Utility GBU, Construction & engineering, hospitality, health sciences & Finance.
How did the Communications GBU actually come about?
Oracle acquired a company called Portal Software, which was doing OSS/BSS for a lot of telco opera- tors globally. All the billing systems, the provisioning systems were running under the Oracle OSS-BSS platform. In 2012 they decided to acquire two other companies. One was Tekelek and the other one was ACME. Tekelek was in forefront and the leader in SS7/ STPC signaling – on the telco side. They have solutions for multi-number portability, signaling transfer point/DSR/PCRF etc– that what they were very very good at.
So Oracle acquired Tekelec which had a predominant market share in the telco space and at the same time, they acquired ACME Packet. ACME Packet was the leader in the Session Border Controller – I will explain what Session Border Controller is – and virtually most telco operators were using the ACME SBC, including the likes of the Big Three that you have in the US. So with these three acquisitions, they formulated what we call as the Communications GBU and this was primarily focused around the service provider to start with because that’s the big business.
How has the structure of the communications GBU evolved with time?
We started realizing that all the service providers today are practically functioning as an enterprise and also the technology used in the telcos is now getting more & more an enterprise adoption flavour. So we formulated an enterprise division within the CGBU and we started focusing on the enterprise for these products. The way we divided our Communications GBU was (i) digitization and monetization – the erstwhile OSS/BSS plus the monetization cloud, the monetization clouds are available for everybody. Second was service providers – the core networks where you have 4G, 5G, IoT, and
solutions around DSr/PCRF/STP in the core network. The third part is the enterprise division.
In enterprise what are the verticals where the CGBU has been witnessing traction?
All the verticals. I will explain to you why. The solutions that were being adopted by telcos are now being pushed into the enterprise. Now why is that happening? Telcos transitioned to IP network internally while the enterprise all went to IP on the internal network. What remains is the connectivity between the telco and the Enterprise. This is still TDM. You still have the E1 Circuits coming in, there’s a physical connection and termination. Now that is changing to an IP environment as well. So with the transition from a TDM environment to a SIP environment, which is the IP environment you need a device that sits in the middle, controls the border, secures and manages the real-time communication, including things like transcoding, natting, denial of service attack; so it’s like a security or a SBC – a security device sitting at the edge.
We know that the telco operators internally while they were IP, externally they were still TDM. Now they are changing from a TDM to SIP environment at their end as well. The moment you get into a SIP environment, the SBC starts playing a big role. It’s like the firewall for voice for real-time communication. We know the firewall for data but this one is a firewall for voice; it controls the entry point into the enterprise. The SBC was something that the ACME Packet founded and has phenomenal expertise in the technology. So we see this transition happening into the enterprise.
What we are seeing, and to take that answer further, the BFSI sector, the BPO or the Contact centre – these are the early adopters. It makes a lot of sense, the return on investment, is very quick, especially on the BPO side.
What does the solution provider domain within the CGBU exactly look after?
On the service provider side, we have solutions for 4G, 5G, VoIP, 5G, IoT and the OSS/BSS. We are doing all those solutions, in addition to the marketing cloud and live experience and others that we have. So why this transition?
Worldwide, In the service provider network and we are a part of that network, we started realizing that while the core network in the service providers is IP , the service providers want to get rid of TDM at the edge. The reason they want to get rid of this TDM is, 1.) It is a big investment, which they had already done so they were phasing it out. Internally within their network, everything is IP. So today when you get a call on your landline, it is a conversion. There’s a huge amount of investment that these guys have put, because that was the technology that was prevailing. Now they are changing all the media gateways at the edge to SIP or SBC. The moment they start doing that, this becomes a very big market. That answers your question, is there a particular segment that you’re looking at from enterprise, not really.
How many telcos in India have gone towards SIP?
Internally they are all ready. All the telcos in their internal network, they have it. It’s a question of putting the business plan in place, most of them have already worked on that, it’s a question of testing their services, some of them have already tested their services – this is something that is going to be a reality and you will see a lot of transition happening from TDM to SIP as we move forward. The reason for that is simple, it saves you a lot of space, saves you a lot of data centre space, it makes it easier – you can ramp up, ramp down the ability to design the network architecture is far better about.
Which are the BPOs in India who have adopted SIP?
I can tell you that amongst the top 20, I think 18 of them would be our customers. Most of the ones you see and talk to, would be using our technology. We have been operating with them for a long time. We started out when SIP became the buzz word in the BPO space, we all started doing pilots. For all these, the large BPOs are beyond the pilot stage. They are Commercially available and most of them are using and expanding. About 2 years ago, it was the pilot.
Even the large BPOs, even within India, have multiple centers, and they have standardized across centers. They are utilizing the SIP technology which is much better architecture than what it used to be. They have standardized on oracle technology (SBC/ ECB/EOM) across the regions and centers.
18 out of top 20 Indian BPOs are our customers