Oracle unveils communications converged application server 5.1

Oracle has announced the release of Oracle Communications Converged Application Server 5.1; a carrier-grade, standards-based development and deployment platform for next-generation communications services.

The new release offers integrated support for Java, web services and IP Multimedia Subsystem standards, enabling communications service providers to rapidly deploy voice, video and data services.

“To deliver new sources of revenue, communications service providers are expanding their traditional communications services into a rich combination of communications, entertainment and productivity services.  Telecommunications application servers such as Oracle Communications Converged Application Server are at the core of this service innovation which maximizes CSPs’ investments in IMS as well as providing a network function virtualization roadmap,” said Glen Ragoonanan, Analysys Mason senior analyst.

 “As stated in the Analysys Mason Service Delivery Platforms: Worldwide Market Shares 2011 report, Oracle leads the telecommunications application server market segment.  With this new release, Oracle demonstrates its continued commitment to investment and innovation in this important segment,” Ragoonanan stated.  

As mobile services continue to shift from traditional phone networks to all-IP and converged systems, CSPs must evolve their development environments to ensure competitive deployment of new services , such as over-the-top content, machine-to-machine communications and rich multimedia content sharing by migrating to an open application architecture that supports a complex ecosystem of application developers, third-party partners and service integrators.

“As CSPs evolve to all-IP and converged networks, they must monetize those investments by deploying differentiated, value-added services to their customers. The latest release of Oracle Communications Converged Application Server offers an open development ecosystem to support innovative application development, while also reducing costs and helping grow revenue,” said Bhaskar Gorti, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Communications.  

The Oracle platform reduces implementation costs by adding a converged load balancer to preserve call state across multi-node configurations, an enhanced service creation environment with pre-built service components, support for virtualization and application orchestration to integrate multiple services.

Part of the Oracle Communications service delivery product family, Oracle Communications Converged Application Server 5.1 helps CSPs monetize networking and IT assets via a highly available, scalable and reliable service deployment architecture. The solution accelerates application development and network services deployment, while enabling lower maintenance costs with an enhanced service creation environment and service foundation toolkit that includes built-in support, maintenance tools and a creation environment based on industry-standard Java Enterprise Edition and Session Initiation Protocol. Servlet standards, including the newly approved media application programming interface, JSR 309 helps reduce implementation costs via a pre-configured, converged load balancer preserving SIP and Hypertext Transfer Protocol message consistency across clustered servers, virtually eliminating the need for a third-party technology. It also helps converge telecommunications and VoLTE/IMS capabilities with web and enterprise domains to open up the development platform to new revenue opportunities, services and business models, while enabling cloud deployment with out-of-the-box virtualization based on Oracle Virtual Machine to provide a virtualized service deployment foundation and a reduced hardware footprint. It will also support messages session relay protocol and request-for-comments 4875 and 4976, which are used for instant messaging and file transfer between SIP sessions and orchestrates messages-to-services across multiple applications with custom application routing.