Overview of Oracle Number Portability

This section provides an overview of Oracle Number Portability and its components. It explains the key concepts, features, and functions of Oracle Number Portability.

This chapter covers the following topics:

What is Oracle Number Portability

To spearhead competition for communications services in the local market, government and regulatory bodies require service providers to support number portability. Number portability refers to subscribers’ ability to change communications service providers without changing their telephone numbers.

Oracle Number Portability addresses the need for telecommunications carriers to support number portability mandates. Oracle Number Portability provides for custom solution to number portability requirement in an existing operating environment. Oracle Number Portability relies on the flexibility and reliability of Oracle Work Flow technology to integrate into existing business processes easily and efficiently, and to accommodate changes in those processes. In addition, it provides for easy and flexible interconnection with existing operation systems and network elements.

Why use Oracle Number Portability?

To meet number portability related mandates, telecommunications service providers need a solution that easily integrates into the existing infrastructure and adapts to the existing business processes. The number portability solution for a carrier must also support interconnection with external entities, such as the central clearinghouse for ported numbers and other carriers involved in porting transactions.

Oracle Number Portability responds to the following business needs:

Key Features

Oracle Number Portability architecture is based on the flexible layered architecture of Oracle Service Fulfillment Manager (SFM). It comprises of different modules that are tightly coupled to each other for performance, yet have well defined interfaces to communicate with external systems. This section describes the key features.

Short Role-Out Time

Oracle Number Portability leverages Oracle Workflow’s rich process automation technology, which considerably shortens the implementation cycle. Each process is automated using the GUI-based builder and its predefined functional activities that are incorporated to model the end-to-end number portability processes. In addition, customers can create additional functional activities to be used as the building blocks of the process. As a result, the modeling of number portability processes becomes as simple as drag-and-drop of the activities in appropriate sequence.

Scalability and Automation

By utilizing the Oracle Technology Stack and Multitier architecture designed for high-performance B2B e-commerce application, Oracle Number Portability can scale to support number management requirement in any country. In addition, the modular design of Oracle Number Portability and the decoupling of the interfaces from the processing engine provides for added flexibility as well as scalability management.

Cross-Enterprise Confidentiality

By assigning ownership to the ported data, the data can only be accessed by the organizations (service providers) that have the proper access privileges. Data belonging to one operator is hidden from view and updated by others, except for the porting record containing routing information, which is public and is broadcast to all operators in the area.

Performance for Bulk Downloads and Synchronization

Oracle Number Portability is built on top of the best and most popular information management technology, namely Oracle Database and Technology Stack. Utilizing this tradition of excellence enables Oracle Number Portability to offer unsurpassed capability in terms of performance and scalability.

Ease of Process Customization

By utilizing Oracle Workflow technology, Oracle Number Portability provides GUI-based process customization. The user can manage the process flow by leveraging the drag-and-drop capabilities of the product.

Event Notifications

Oracle Number Portability provides customizable notifications. These notifications can be triggered automatically as a result of events or timeouts.

Open Interfaces to External Systems

Oracle Number Portability supports open Internet standards for message-based applications. It supports XML standards through a GUI-based message definition application. The application provides the ability to define new Message Types and generate optimized code for sending, validating, decoding and processing of messages.

Business Processes

Oracle Number Portability is uniquely positioned to serve the global number portability needs. It can address the administrative requirements of number portability, as well as provide for easy integration of the number portability solution with the existing business environment.

The major features of Oracle Number Portability include:

Service Order Administration

Oracle Number Portability Service Order Administration (Oracle Number Portability SOA) interfaces with the carrier's customer care or order management system to obtain customer service orders that require number portability. Oracle Number Portability SOA converts this service order into a number portability transaction and sends it to the appropriate Number Registration Center (NRC, central database maintained by national or regional number registration centers in the United States) or uses other methods (depending on regional requirements outside the United States) to communicate the request to the other carrier.

You can also customize the Oracle Number Portability SOA to mediate orders between service providers for a firm order commitment. This ensures that the porting request is mutually agreeable, and that any porting obstacles are removed before initiating mediations with the regional NRC. The synchronization of parallel process instances allows two parallel processes (example, transactions for porting more than one telephone number ranges) to synchronize at user defined points so that they are both completed or rejected.

Service Management System

Oracle Number Portability Service Management System receives and processes ported number information from NRC (in the United States) or via other methods (depending on regional requirements outside the United States). It validates the incoming order and translates the routing information to provisioning messages that are sent to the domain level NEMS (example, Oracle Provisioning component or external activation engine) for provisioning the customer on the appropriate network elements.

Service Fulfillment Management

Oracle Number Portability is dependent on the Oracle Service Fulfillment Manager (Oracle SFM), which acts as a generic fulfillment engine to provision network elements. It will convert information given by Oracle Number Portability Service Management System to messages appropriate for provisioning the required network elements.

Oracle SFM supports complete order tracking and management functions such as Flow Through and Fallout Management, Dependency Analysis and Due Date Management. It also supports various communications protocols such as TELNET and TCP/IP. You can easily build new adapters for any other customized protocol such as E-mail, Web or batch transfers.

Integration and Dependencies

Oracle Number Portability is dependent on Oracle Service Fulfillment Manager (SFM). Oracle SFM includes new features that integrate with Oracle Inventory (optional), Oracle Bills of Material, Oracle Customer Model (optional), Oracle Installed Base (optional), Oracle Applications Manager, and Oracle Generic Services Manager. Oracle Number Portability benefits from these new Oracle SFM integration points.