Andrew Lau, Oracle’s general manager for communications, media and utilities industry in South Asia, said almost all local telecommunications firms already use Oracle products as they prepare for the convergence of traditional network-based and information technology-driven communications.

For instance, Smart Communications has built its own prepaid revenue system using Oracle products which gave them a flexible and reliable IT infrastructure.

"Based on Oracle Pro C and traditional PL/SQL, we have been able to quickly build our robust and highly flexible prepaid billing system in merely three months," said Smart applications systems head Noel Gatchalian.

Smart developed its prepaid billing system on Oracle Database and Oracle Application Server, with the ability to flexibly configure and customize for different commercial or external applications in accordance to specific requirements of the new product or service.

The system’s front end, built with Oracle Application Server Web services, delivers information to Smart’s customer service representatives through an Internet portal accessible through a browser interface.

The portal also provides data from the financial data in Smart’s Oracle Database.

With the scalability and high quality of its Oracle infrastructure, Smart’s cellular technology network managed up to 24 billion calls in its first year, up 45.7 percent from the previous year.

Moving forward, Smart plans to implement Oracle Real Application Clusters for increased performance and protection against hardware failures and upgrading to Oracle Application 10g to ready Smart’s system for grid computing.

Lau said these will boost reliability of Smart’s system and is preparation for moving into Oracle Fusion Middleware and eventually Oracle Fusion.

Oracle Fusion Middleware is a portfolio of leading, standards-based, and customer-proven software products that spans a range of tools and service including J2EE and developer tools, integration services, business intelligence, collaboration and content management.

Oracle Fusion Middleware’s hot-pluggable architecture allows customers to leverage their investment in any existing application, system or technology while minimizing the disruption of planned or unplanned outages with its unbreakable qualities.