Oracle this week raised a new banner for its telco cloud, applications, and network support services for mobile network operators using cloud architecture. Oracle Cloud for Telcos represents an amalgamation of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Oracle Communications core network, and more than 60 other application suites from Oracle and third-party providers.

“With our heritage in data and data management, we’re taking an application-oriented approach instead of just selling infrastructure,” Leo Leung, global VP at OCI, wrote in response to questions.

He claims Oracle is uniquely positioned among hyperscalers because it provides industry-specific applications and more telco-centric services and applications natively, which removes the need for customers to build or work with third parties to assemble a full stack.

Oracle plans to introduce more capabilities, including services that will help operators build on the company’s distributed and hybrid cloud offerings, according to Leung. “We already offer Dedicated Regions and Roving Edge Infrastructure and are in the process of rolling out additional new capabilities and features in these areas,” he explained. 

Oracle’s Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer allows enterprises to run a fully managed cloud region inside their data center as a single tenant, something Leung describes as a “difference maker for telcos” because the offering is not tethered to Oracle’s public cloud.

Meanwhile its public cloud, OCI, is available in 36 regions globally and the company plans to make the service available in 44 regions by the end of 2022. Wireless carriers can tap into OCI or the private variant for a cloud-native 5G core, enterprise IT and services, industry-specific applications, operations and business support systems (OSS/BSS), Kubernetes managed containers, and network functions.

“Acquiring cloud service capabilities has been relatively straightforward for telcos. If they want a service, they would either have to stand it up themselves on their own hardware (such as Red Hat OpenShift), or they would be tethered to a public cloud for the service (such as Amazon Web Services Outposts), Clay Magouyrk, EVP at OCI, wrote in a blog post. 

“Oracle Cloud for Telcos redefines the market,” he claimed. “In addition to our public cloud regions, we offer entire cloud stacks — inclusive of hardware, scaling, refresh, patches, and upgrades — in an opex model.”

The company also claims the cloud control plane resides with network operators in the public or private scenario, and all data and metadata stays within the carrier’s environment. 

“We expect a mix of deployments, depending on locality to a public cloud region, level of cloud adoption, as well as the customer’s compliance requirements,” Leung explained. “We believe that telco IT, OSS/BSS, and some network functions are the most likely to move to public cloud today.”

Privacy, regulations, and low-latency requirements means some network functions will need to run as part of an operator’s on-premises and edge locations, he added. Meanwhile, security and performance remain central to Oracle’s pursuits in the telecom sector with isolated network virtualization, secure firmware installation, a controlled physical network, and network segmentation.

Oracle’s 5G core network functions include policy, charging, signaling, routing, networks analytics, and automation — all of which can run on core or edge environments and interoperate with third-party core network functions on Oracle Cloud, according to the company. 

Finally, Leung highlighted Oracle’s 30 years experience in signaling, routing, policy and network security experience with telco operators as a differentiator. “Oracle Communications connects millions of applications and secures thousands of networks serving billions of mobile devices around the world,” he boasted.