Oracle aims to flatten mobile silos, simplify billing

Oracle’s new Connected Digital Lifestyle solution, announced this week, gives communications service providers a unified platform for mobile content management, delivery, advertising - and billing.

The product is designed to enhance an operator’s service delivery platform, enabling them to leverage network assets to deliver revenue-generating applications. Essentially it is an end-to-end digital content retailing platform that allows service providers to increase revenue and customer loyalty across multiple touch points.

Importantly, the product incorporates in-app billing to simplify the purchasing experience and increase revenue through significantly higher conversion rates, as service providers take advantage of the customer’s ‘impulsive buy’ moment.

In addition, the product supports other trends that service providers need to address to become the platform on which the world turns, including multi-channel advertising capabilities; location and subscriber profile targeting and the ability to leverage key customer intelligence and network assets, such as location-based services, billing and messaging. The product can also leverage network assets by exposing them as Web 2.0 APIs. This means that CSPs can quickly create innovative applications and services.

At the same time Oracle announced the release of its Billing and Revenue Management upgrade – 7.5 – which aims to allow enterprises to unify their charging, introduce new systems across silos and business groups, support a variety of online charging concepts and through their upgraded mediation product control all network products from a single console.

Products of this kind will help service providers break out of the traditional billing models that have constrained them and generate new revenue streams from assets they control. It will, along the way increase customer loyalty and, through in- app billing, put another nail in the coffin of the more complex and expensive mobile payments solutions.