Machine-to-machine is one of the hot topics in networking these days, and so, not surprisingly, has a strong presence at Mobile World Congress (News - Alert). Oracle is among the companies addressing the M2M space.
TMCnet this week in Barcelona met with Oracle directors to understand the company’s M2M play.
Oracle’s (News - Alert) platforms and products address M2M from the device to the data center, explains Cheng-Kian Khor, director of architecture for the company’s communications and media industry solutions group – Asia Pacific and Japan.
The company, according to the director, helps service providers with two key aspects of M2M: service management and the ability to generate and grow revenue streams by delivering innovative applications.
On the service management front, Oracle delivers solutions for billing, provisioning and other back-office functions. Traditional telco billing systems based on CDRs are not going to cut it for M2M, says Khor, because M2M devices can generate huge amounts of sensor and telemetry data.
So M2M service providers can leverage Oracle’s Elastic Charging Engine, benchmarked as being able to support up to three billion events per hour.
Elaborating on Oracle’s focus on enabling revenue generation via innovative applications, Khor says there’s been a sea change in the market given past M2M deployments have leveraged point solutions for specific industry verticals, but now new platforms can be applied across different verticals. That enables service providers to get new M2M implementations and applications to market more quickly for their customers, allowing developers to create applications that can work in various scenarios.
Oracle offers solutions on this front both at the device level (with its Java Micro Edition on Qualcomm’s (News - Alert) system on a chip) and within the data center (with the Oracle Communications Service Delivery platform).
The company also offers analytics capabilities for M2M data.
Hughes (News - Alert) Telematics, which was recently acquired by Verizon, is among the companies applying these Oracle solutions to its M2M implementations. Hughes is in Oracle’s booth at Mobile World Congress demonstrating an M2M application by insurance provider State Farm; a soon-to-be-launched Lifecomm watch solution, a joint Oracle-Qualcomm solution that enables caregivers to remotely check the status of elderly folks so they are aware if they have fallen or otherwise need assistance; and some other M2M applications.
Edited by Braden Becker