What if we could transform at a pace that suits us, do more with our budget and reduce complexity? They are the familiar questions relating to the challenges facing the telecoms industry. Your business will not stop and wait, writes Neil Sholay. Sponsored by Oracle



Transformation – the process of moving from a current state to another – is ongoing in the telecoms sector as new technologies, market opportunities and competition emerge. Indeed, it’s safe to say that the only constant is change itself. But change is necessary, for example, achieving operational excellence is a business imperative, but it’s often hampered by fragmented system architectures or silo’d departmental approaches which have evolved over time or been constrained by the availability of budget.

A service oriented architecture approach to transformation can give you control over these demanding challenges. It can enable you to build new capabilities while maximising your existing assets and be responsive to the business needs without extensive development programmes, but most of all, you can control the pace of transformation to suit you.

Budget optimisation

If you could reduce the operational expenditure budget you have currently committed to maintaining legacy systems and use it to invest in enabling technology, this will make an enormous difference to your ability to innovate and compete. The ability to make better use of technology to do more, do it quickly, and do it for less cost is something all IT leaders and CIOs strive for but the difficulty is how. The challenge is to achieve a managed, lower risk transformation that doesn’t require any systems to be prematurely turned off and without impact on the business operation.

Simplicity

In every business, complexity is a headache. If you could dramatically reduce the complexity of your current operation by using standardised industry processes and commercial off the shelf platforms, it has the potential to change your IT operations – for the better.

Customer service excellence, for example, is an admirable objective. In reality, layers of business process and application complexity inevitably stand in the way of intelligent and engaging customer interaction. This makes it costly to quickly deploy new services and almost impossible to share and reuse common services.

The question is, how do you unravel that complexity so you can use all your data, processes and functions – across all systems – to speed up product assembly and improve customer interaction.

Transforming the modern telco

How can telcos balance increasing operational investment in existing systems required to keep them running with increasing capital investment in new service platforms required to deliver new products? What part does IT play in bringing new products to market rapidly, without having to build them directly upon the very same systems that telcos are attempting to transform? How do they overcome vertically silo’d systems that are preventing innovations like converged services and product blending and how to counteract the rising operational expenditure of existing systems that are limiting investment in new platforms and services and compromising their ability to compete?

And what of service oriented architectures? As Telcos begin transforming their IT infrastructure and unlocking the value within them, the service oriented architecture becomes an important piece of infrastructure for transformation. But there are crucial lessons to be shared. For example, the success of transformation is highly dependent on senior management’s willingness to drive organisational change, architecture governance and technology adoption.

With Oracle, You Can

Whether it’s transforming on your terms, doing more with your budget, reducing complexity or all three, be confident that all of this can be achieved with Oracle. So next time your CEO says; “What if we could launch a new product bundle in six weeks”, with a SOA infrastructure you’ll have the confidence that allows you to say; “We can”.

What do you need to put in place to achieve this?

· Out-of-the-box communications solutions which are based on industry standard processes helping to achieve lower costs, shorter implementation times and higher reliability.

· Pre-integrated applications using service oriented architectures, which lower implementation and maintenance costs.

· A repository of standard, common business objects, application connectors and services to ensure high reusability with easier maintenance and upgrades.

· An open standards approach which means there is no vendor lock-in so your solution is aligned with industry direction, upgrades come at a lower cost and you have complete control.

Go to www.what-if-we-could.com to download the full-length white paper to find out more and discover the steps involved for using SOA as a business strategy and architecture for transforming your IT systems and applications to meet today’s challenges and be ready for what tomorrow brings.

Learn about the realities of SOA transformation and see what Oracle can do for you. GTB

Neil Sholay is director of communications market development at Oracle