1 Introduction

Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper's Partner Relationship Management module gives operators a set of Web Services interfaces that can be used to incorporate the Service Provider and Application management parts of the Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper into their CRM/PRM systems, intranets and extranets.

Integration with External Systems

Administering service provider and application accounts for Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper can be a work-intensive task for operators. Using CRM/PRM applications that are built using the Partner Relationship module can allow operators to shift some of that work to the service providers themselves, as well as giving those service provides a defined and structured channel both to communicate any changes they desire and to monitor their own usage statistics. The operator's task is reduced to simply approving the pre-entered changes, dramatically reducing administration overhead. Using simple Web Service calls, the integrated PRM application can manage a wide range of Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper service provider account services.

The PRM interfaces support Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper's service provider and application administration model, which is described more fully in Chapter 2, "The Partner Management Model."

Note:

Users, both operator-based and service-provider-based, who have been given appropriate permissions can also interact with Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper management systems using JMX-based solutions. For information on the MBeans available for use and the attributes and operations they expose, please see Accounts and SLAs Guide.

Security

The PRM Web Services module uses WS-Security to ensure the security of the Web Services based interaction between the PRM and its CRM/PRM application clients. Each request is authenticated using a username token or X.509 certificate that is included in the SOAP header. For more information on how this works, see the “Interacting with Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper” chapter in the Application Developer's Guide, another document in this set. Although the context in that guide is the SOAP headers of traffic requests, the mechanism described is identical to the one used in with the PRM module.

Note:

For backwards compatibility purposes, a session ID-based login mode is also supported.

Deployment Example

The Partner Relationship Management module consists of two parts:

• The Web Service interfaces that are used by the CRM/PRM application

• The implementation of these Web Services

Figure 1-1 Deployment example

In the Figure 1-1, "Deployment example", there are two CRM/PRM applications, one supporting the Service Provider set of interfaces and the other supporting the more comprehensive Operator set of interfaces. Each of these applications uses Web Service calls to communicate with the host(s) running the PRM Web Services. The PRM Web Services module is deployed by default on the AT Tier cluster. The PRM server(s) in turn use JMX to communicate with the Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper servers that actually handles the telecom traffic.