Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Oracle's Communications Industry Strategy Conference Call. All participants are in a listen only mode. I would now like to turn the call over to Shawna O'Boyle. Thanks, Jamie. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today as part of our ongoing educational speaker series hosted by Oracle.
I am Sean O'Boyle, Senior Manager, Investor Relations and today is Thursday, July 11, 2013. Joining us today is Oracle Executive Senior Vice President, Bhaskar Bodi and Equity Research Analyst, Raimo Lenschow of Barclays. Today, Bhaskar will discuss Oracle's Communications Global Business Unit. However, he will not be discussing any information today that is not already publicly available. At the conclusion of Bhaskar's presentation, we will turn the webcast over to Raimo, who will moderate the question and answer portion of the webcast.
However, you may submit questions at any time during the presentation by typing your question in the Q and A box in the lower part of your screen. Please keep in mind that we will not comment on the current quarter. As a reminder, the matters we will be discussing today may include forward looking statements and as such are subject to the risks and uncertainties that we discuss in detail in our documents filed with the SEC, specifically the most recent reports on Forms 10 ks and 10 Q, which identify important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ from those contained in forward looking statements. You're cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward looking statements, which reflect our opinions only as of the date of this presentation. Please keep in mind that we will not obligate ourselves to revise, update or publicly release the results of any revisions of these forward looking statements in light of new information or future events.
Lastly, unauthorized recording of this conference call is not permitted. I would now like to introduce Bhaskar.
Thank you, Shauna. Hello, everyone. My name is Bhaskar Gorti. I lead Oracle's Communications business and I want to thank Raimo and Barclays for hosting this call and all of you for joining. It's a privilege to have this opportunity to share with you Oracle's strategy in telecommunications.
And my mission and that of my organization, it's very, very clear and comes directly from our CEO, Larry Ellison and this was his quote from our Q3 March earnings call. So this is a very strategic industry for us and I want to share with you how we are building upon and serving the telecommunications market. If you look at what our industry strategy is, this started almost 8, 9 years ago. Larry had a vision of how we can extend our focus in some key industries that are going through rapid transformation. So we have focused on industries like Financial Services, the retail, utilities, health sciences, public sector and manufacturing.
Today, I'll focus That's the industry segment that I run. And we have our approach has been very deliberate in these verticals to really differentiate and increase the value we deliver to our customers. Through organic investment and some selective acquisitions, we have built verticalized business units that focus exclusively on some of the mission critical technology and in my case I would call carrier grade solutions that are needed by these vertical industries. At the same time, these industry capabilities are built into and collaborated all the way down the Oracle stack, whether it's in CRM or ERP or our business intelligence, our middleware, our database all the way to our hardware and systems. To give you a flavor for our addressable market, service providers, this is their IT spend.
If you look at it, it's pretty significant about $55,000,000,000 And today we are a leader in business support systems and operational support system and also service delivery. With Acme and TechCollect, it helps us expand further into the communications network infrastructure. To give you a flavor, the CapEx that service providers spend on the network side is greater than that of the IT. In addition, we have some really innovative technologies and solutions here that help large enterprises to speed the adoption of IP based communication and collaboration and also lower their cost, but also provide a rich feature set of communications and collaboration for their employees, customers and partners. And that segment represents an additional market opportunity of about $20,000,000,000 plus according to Gartner and one which we can leverage very strongly given Oracle's strong position in global enterprises worldwide.
This unified communication technology provides secure, trusted, reliable and regulatory compliant communications to industries like banking, healthcare, commercial services and public sector. Now across all industries, what's happening is the user expectations, any service, anytime, anywhere on any device. So the number of connections are multiplying every day and we are just at the beginning of these connections to multiply significantly with the whole concept of machine to machine. While all these connections are increasing, the touch points are increasing, the locations are increasing, the expectations are skyrocketing. The expectations are to have a seamless service across any device, any media and any network.
All along having a quality of service and reliability and especially in the business segment when you're talking about telemedicine, security and surveillance and emergency services, reliability and quality is extremely important. And in some key industries like healthcare, financial services, the regulatory compliance is very critical for the customer's communication data. And all this has to be personalized whether it's at home for a digital lifestyle or at the enterprise for an enterprise dashboard. And this is very important these days for the right decision to be made to have the right information on the right device at the right time. So the context is also extremely important.
So what are service providers faced with? They're all moving to all IP networks. They are delivering these IP networks deliver the best of the traditional telephony circuit switch networks which are voice oriented. They are high quality, but they are costly to maintain and slow to deliver new services. You look at the other side, the IP Internet, it's data oriented, low cost packet routing.
But the challenge there is its best effort in delivering service and it's inconsistent in quality depending on where you are. So an all IP network is where everybody is moving to, where these are voice, data and video oriented. They support fixed and mobile, but at a lower cost and a guaranteed quality and service. So operators are transforming their business to manage these customers and moving away from silos that today exist in many of the operators around the world. And policy management and IMS are strategic in this evolution of all and all IP network.
So what are some of the challenges they face as they are deploying these IP networks around the world is they have to deliver scalable services in a secure, reliable and more importantly in an interoperable manner. Now these are significant investments they have to make. So it has to go beyond just optimization. So they have to be able to monetize these investments and their ability to differentiate services from over the top players. And the traditional approaches have been pretty expensive and complex.
Also large enterprises also have similar set of challenges. They have to provide real time communications in a secure manner, but at the same time at a lower cost and enable their employees and their customers and their partners to interact with them on any channel, on any application and any device. We all hear bring your own device BYOD that's becoming a real thing across every enterprise. So these are some of the challenges in deploying an all IP network. So what's Oracle's strategy in here?
So our strategy is very simple. It's a 4 part strategy and it's 1st of all focused on we have a product based approach. And 1, we want to build a comprehensive complete end to end portfolio. 2, we want to build these using open standards in the industry and some of the standards that are used in the industry in telecommunications are developed by engineers who are here in our business. We want to build these products so that they're integrated and they're engineered to work together.
We don't want to integrate them and spend customers' custom dollars in doing it on-site. So we want to engineer these solutions to work together. And we're doing that all along maintaining the flexibility for a faster time to market. So these are the four pillars of our overall communications product strategy. Now in this industry, it's been a long journey.
If you look at where we have innovated and we have acquired and added some market leading companies for the last 8, 9 years, starting with CRM in telecommunications, IP billing and rating in communications from portal, provisioning and order management from Metasol, Telecom's application server, the app server from BEA. From Sun, we have network compliance and carrier grade NED certified hardware. And our 2 most recent additions are market leading products from Acme in session delivery networks and tekalec in network signaling. So you see these are some of the market leading products that we have brought on board and significantly increased our investment in building and enhancing these products and the domain expertise. So if you look at the next slide, this gives you an idea of our industry portfolio.
And I talked about complete and open and integrated. We have our systems and technology from the larger organization. We have supply chain and finance and procurement and the cross channel customer engagement. But my business unit managing network resources, pricing, charging and policy to billing and subscriber data management. We have a strong service delivery platform, which helps operators create the service, execute it And we also have, which primarily we only sell right branded, I.
E. The service providers provide these, is a large e mail, I'm chat, calendaring with 200 plus 1,000,000 subscribers worldwide using it through our service provider customers. And our 2 recent additions give us a very strong footprint in the session delivery infrastructure, in session border control, in core signaling, whether it's SS7 or diameter and session recording. So that is our current portfolio and which we continue to invest in and sell and deliver on a global basis to Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 operators worldwide. So if you look at how are we now helping our customers enable the end to end customer interaction from the front office.
So Oracle is the only company that provides technology that spans the entire customer experience from the front office to the back office and into the core network. So working across all these customer channels, whether it's through web or through retail, telecom companies and service providers in the world are some of the largest retailers and the complexity of that retail solution for them has dramatically increased because of smart devices and tablets and we have a market leading retail solution where the customer is interacting through contact center or through different channels and partners. So we look at this entire lifecycle of managing orders, activating services and then providing charging and billing. So this is how we help our customers, service providers to control and provide better customer usage and experience all along monetizing these personalized services. Now as we see, there is going to be 4 gs and LTE is real.
It is going to happen. It is happening in certain parts of the world to help really generate. The key here for us, our focus is how can we work with our operators as they roll out 4 gs LTE to provide incremental revenue with new offerings whether it's video voicemail or location based services, mobile health and wellness. So this is a unique opportunity for us and many of the services are simply not possible today or they are they cannot be delivered or if they are delivered, there are ways to monetize them are extremely challenging. So this is where Oracle brings in a set of solutions to help monetize 4 gs and LTE investments to the service providers.
Now a lot has been written about big data on the IT side, but if you look at now we can work with our service providers and really provide if you look at the big data solutions, we can now have data that's from customers, from products, from usage, from service and now from the network. So we can bring all that together in an industry standard data model and provide scale and address complexity for our customers and give them the ability to leverage big data technologies to provide a better customer experience across the entire lifecycle. And lastly, as I said earlier, we do also sell some of our technologies to large enterprises to provide unified communication and collaboration and both with Acme and the products we have in UCS help our customers deliver secure solution for voice and video, very high quality, also efficient contact centers and then really communications enabling business processes and e commerce. So that's a brief introduction to our communications industry strategy. And now I'll hand it over to Raimo.
Right. Thank you, Bhaskar. I'm sorry to turn the call over to Raimo for the Q and A portion of the call. Let me remind listeners that you can submit a question at any time by typing a question in the Q and A box that you'll find in the lower part of your screen. Raimo?
Perfect. Thank you and thanks for having me on the call here today. Bhaskar, let's start actually just to get the audience all on the same level here. Just tell us a little bit about yourself, when you joined Oracle, where you came from? Maybe let's start with that.
Sure. I was at Portal Software, which was a leading IP rating and billing and charging company. And so I came from there about 8 years now. Yes, I'm in my 8th financial year here and started the Communications Global Business Unit. And so that's how I ended up here, Raimo.
Okay, perfect. And then just because from an investor perspective, we haven't really talked too much about telco at Oracle so far. Help us understand how big is it and how important is the communications segment for Oracle? So a couple of data points
I can share with you. If you look at our top 20 all of those top 20 customers worldwide, I would say close to half of them are telecommunications companies on an annual basis, just to give you one flavor. The other comment I would make is if you give you a sense of the size of the business, it is material. Also some data points is prior to the acquisition, if you look at Acme Packets annualized revenue or Techolex, that's roughly about 700,000,000 dollars And so you put those 2 together and add that to our business unit, it's significantly large. And as an independent unit, we would be one of the largest technology suppliers to the service provider industry.
Wow, that's really interesting. Okay. Thanks for that. I'm trying to go a little bit deeper now into the telco space. And you mentioned the IP network rollout earlier as in your presentation as an important driver for the industry.
And if you look at that, you know that fixed line today is already mostly IP based. But what are the drivers to go more specifically into the IP based rollout for mobile networks and why is that so important for the service providers?
Couple of things. One is IP is ubiquitous. You can deploy it anywhere. 2, it's very cost effective and it handles voice data and video. And especially as you look at mobile broadband, I think that's going to that's another huge area of investment and drive for our service providers.
So if you look at all these segments and once you start looking into the B2B side, whether it's machine to machine, whether it's telemedicine, whether it's banking, I think IP networks are much more efficient. And the key challenge there is how do you bring reliability and quality of service onto these IP networks. And that's where we look at that as a big opportunity for us to differentiate.
Yes. Okay. And just you mentioned it already, but can you talk a little bit about the technical challenges just to for the audience to understand a little bit better? So if I go to an IP based network, what are the things that kind of are headaches for the operators there?
I mean security, that's a big headache. Quality of service, because if you depending on where you're coming from, where you are and what connection you have, last mile connection, security is an issue, quality of service is an issue. Then you have these things the industry calls signaling storms where a lot of folks are trying to access and voice and data and there's no way to prioritize it and it brings the networks down. So and if you look at many of us have applications whether it's on our smartphones or tablets, even when we are not using it, these are chatty applications. They are syncing.
They are generating signals. And so that there's a lot of traffic. So the scale is orders of magnitude more in today's network. So it's security. It's signaling scale, it's quality of service.
And then when you're doing that, the challenge is how do you optimize, how do you optimize these networks because you can't keep throwing more capital investment on it. And that's one of the areas where we strongly believe that more and more and more intelligence is moving towards software and virtualization. And that's our DNA. So that fits very well with us in as things are moving to more software based approach to IP networks and services. So how do you optimize these?
But then an equally important one, which is where everybody is scratching their heads is how do you monetize these investments? How do you charge for? What kind of policies you put out there so that if somebody wants to download a movie or somebody is doing very specific video chat with their pharmacist, for that 10, 15, 20 minutes, can they get a burst capacity and pay $5 more, get a higher capacity, high reliability, HD quality and then go back to the normal service. So how do you create those policies? How do you charge for those things?
These are extremely challenging right now and that's why service providers are looking at innovative solutions and you can't do that in the traditional old telephony network.
Yes. Okay. Perfect. And talk a little bit about how from an Oracle perspective, so what exactly are you doing there? And maybe fit Acne Pak in there as well just to help us understand.
I can't see the problem, but how is Oracle helping with the solution?
Yes. I mean, it's been a long journey. If you think about when our BSS solutions were all originally written and we have patents on it for IP rating and billing. We were a little early in the market. We knew the world would go IP.
We were a little early. And in the IP world, you want to be both network agnostic because you don't know what kinds of networks it will run on whether it's cable, whether it's wireline, broadband, satellite. So you have to be network agnostic and also you don't know what applications will run on it. So we have that set of solutions. Then we also have IP based activation, network and inventory control and order management.
And these order management is a significant problem for service providers is you get an order, anybody and let me use a consumer example, you order a phone or you order a cable TV that has many, many parts in it, all the way from the device to activating it, turning on the services and getting the right price plans and charging it. So we have an OSS service fulfillment portfolio. So that is again an IP based solution for us. And then if you look at the telecom app server, right, it's the ability for service providers to have their networks securely built so that they can open it up for 3rd party applications and apps developers. So that's another IP based technology.
And then comes ACME, which brings us into session border control and IMS and session routing. As folks are deploying SIP trunks and moving their traffic at every edge and at every connection point, you need a session border controller. So that's where ACME comes into play.
Okay. So if I summarize it, basically the network of the future is going to be IP based and while the old guys were circuit based and could do that, like if you look at your portfolio, you're kind of basically focused on IP, I. E. On the future all the time. Is that the right way to describe it?
Yes. And I think it's I would say, Raimo, it's not a future, it's already here. Many, many operators around the world are already deploying and moving their existing traffic and subscribers and services on to an IP network. It's happening at a different pace in the countries, but it's already happening.
Okay. Yes. Right? It's
already happening. Now that doesn't mean that the traditional SS7 signaling market is going away. The 2 gs, 3 gs networks will be there for a very long time, right? Yes. They will be there.
The 2 gs, 3 gs networks will be there for a long time. 4 gs is coming. And that's where with Tekelec, we have an SS7 signaling solution that serves these 2 gs, 3 gs markets, whether it's local number portability, whether it's EIR. So we have those set of services also.
Okay, perfect. So is that kind of also because as people do the work there, that's kind of your to a degree your entry ticket, like you talk as you have the basics and if they move on to IP, you're there a barefoot?
Yes. So we do bring a unique combination of the telecom network domain and the IP software domain we bring. So therefore, we can work with the service providers in helping them and working with them, designing and migrating their network. So we because these are not folks are not going to repower the existing infrastructure overnight. It's a gradual change and there will still be usage for the traditional networks.
So we work with them because we are incumbent in many places. So as they are transforming, we look to be a clear partner for transformation.
All right. Okay, perfect. And so where I mean if you look at the journey and me, German, trying to be a baseball guy, Now, so where are we in terms of kind of innings in terms of the adoption here?
I think we are in the early innings right now. We are in the very early innings, very, very early innings. Yes? Yes. But the game is definitely being played in every part of the world.
It's just at a different stage. But see if you think about it, the last decade was all about the growth was all subscriber driven around the world. More and more and more subscribers are coming on to the network. I think now barring a few places in the world, the subscriber growth has pretty much flattened out. Everybody who can't get a phone or can't get a smartphone already has one now.
So that's subscriber driven growth that drove the industry for the last 10 years or so, I think that's passed now, right? Now it's all about, okay, how do I make sure I provide, but at the same time, the services and the explosion of data on these networks is increasing. So how do you monetize that? How do you optimize that? How do you leverage commercial off the shelf hardware, not get locked into custom built hardware?
How do you do this in software so that you can transition change much quickly? So that's what we see as a huge opportunity moving forward.
Okay. Perfect. I mean, if I'm playing devil's apple cart for one second, I mean, if an apple pack was still a standalone, an independent company, that was kind of the dream always that we had to build out of the IP, 4 gs, mobile networks and they will be kind of a main player there. But then actually the network build out was always a little bit slower than people were hoping for. What do you see in terms of what the operators are doing at the moment and in terms of speed of adoption?
I think U. S. Is running ahead of Europe, but what's your thinking around that here?
I think it is these networks are getting rolled out. I don't I think the adoption of IP based networks is not an acne packet issue. It's about it's a capital intensive effort. So depending on the operators, you're seeing a lot of progress, a lot of progress in North America. You're seeing a lot of progress in Korea and in some places like Japan.
I think some of the economic situations are slowing down some of the investments in some other parts of the world, but you will see that happening everywhere. Okay. Perfect. So I think in the next 10 years, I definitely see that this will happen. It's just a question of we do see operators around the world working with us on 4 gs and LTE and IP deployments.
Okay. So it's really for you actually it's much better fitted in as part of Oracle because you know it's coming. It's just a question of when then?
Yes. And I think this is where we are today working with our customers in many cases in production and in some cases in their labs and trying to test their systems out. So yes, we are engaged in, I would say, close to 100 plus operators around the world on this.
Okay, perfect. Okay. And one of the things in preparation for the call that we talked to kind of a decent amount of operators here and one of the things that they mentioned as part of the IP based network rollout, network intelligence seems to be the kind of the buzzword that kind of comes up all of the time there. Can you talk us tell us or talk a little bit about towards that theme of what you see from the service provider level in terms of around that subject? What are they thinking there?
Yes. And so in fact we had a network we have a network intelligence solution that's almost 4 plus years old now. And especially and we couple of years ago released what is called an Oracle Communications Data Model. It's an industry compliant model which brings in because if you think about it right now, one of the challenges many operators have, it's either happening after the fact in a data warehousing kind of aspect. So when they're talking about network intelligence, that network intelligence has to connect with customer data, with product data, with service data to provide better customer experience.
So I think it's not just intelligence in the network, it's intelligence across the board and that's where I mean we have a strong set of analytics and BI tools and solutions for our customers And especially when we combine that with our RX analytics platform, I think the ability to bring intelligence at the moment of truth is here.
Yes. I mean that was one of the feedbacks where a lot of the guys mentioned that you guys were like you have all the assets there. So you could be or you will probably be a very, very big player in this space. Yes. And if you think about
anything also it's when you talk about network intelligence or intelligence in the service provider environment, I think today one of the bigger challenges that everybody is focused on is to help optimize their networks. How do you reduce your costs and improve service? I think that's the first step of intelligence being used. The second step is coming in many places is now with this intelligence how can I monetize it, location based services? How can I monetize?
So that's where the intelligence comes into play. And most of the challenge, the already there. The data is there in the networks and in the billing systems and in the customer care system. How do you bring it all together to make meaningful decisions in real time? That's where we come in.
Okay. Perfect. Okay. And then next question is then how far could you drive that? I mean like the one hand, you could do the network intelligence, but you obviously also have billings out there.
I mean that's kind of almost the next leg of the story. If you cannot combine the customization for decline but also kind of link that out with billings, is that kind of an angle or am I
driving it too far now? No, no, you're spot on. I think if you think about that's why I always differentiate using intelligence. It's there are 2 sides to the coin. One side is optimization and the other side is monetization.
And when you start getting into monetization, you have to have the ability to connect this intelligence to billing, rating, charging and that's where we have those solutions from TechAleg. We get policy. So now you can monetize based on policies, right? So policies are like business rules. Today many of them are using policy to optimize network traffic and how do you do that.
The next generation of that has already started is now how do I monetize based on policy. Start off Think about toll lanes, right, for a specific reason or if you are doing a telemedicine or if you are doing a remote class for an hour, you want a better quality, but you don't want to pay for that 24 hours a day. You just want it for that 1 hour. So that's monetization. Therefore, you have to connect with billing and rating and charging.
So it's a natural thing that we bring to the table.
And what does it mean like if I look, I mean at the moment if I think about billings, I'm thinking the big heavyweight kind of, I mean, I'll call it legacy now, I'm sorry for saying that like Amdocs or something like that, but they are kind of living in the old world. What does this kind of new world mean for the whole billings industry then?
I think, first of all, it's real time, right? It's all real time. And it is it has to be able to provide in its convergence, I. E, we always find it interesting. People say I have a cable billing solution or I have a wireless billing solution or an IP.
Our solution is service agnostic and network agnostic, okay? And the second biggest differentiator for us compared to the others is ours is a product based approach. So it's all about configuration and flexibility. If you want to give you an example, there was a time where many governments passed regulations that you have to instead of a minute rounding, you have to round to seconds, okay? The bills have to be your usage has to be rounded to seconds.
The traditional legacy players, you had to go and code that and it took months and 1,000,000 to do it. In our systems, it's a flag, right? So as you move more and more towards product and software and configuration rather than customization, I think time to market and cost are the 2 key things. So if you look at that's the key thing for us.
Yeah. Okay. And if I think about going back to Network Intelligence because that seems to be like a key theme here, who would be other players then? I mean, when I start looking and thinking, I mean, you could think about the hardware guys like an Ericsson, but that's kind of you need to be all out then. Who would be players in this space then?
I mean, we do see certain categories. I mean, in certain places you will see, but I think today we believe we have a strong portfolio where we can connect all elements for a customer experience whether it's regardless of channel whether it's web, retail, contact center, products, services and now with the network data. I think we may see individual solutions, but I think we strongly believe we have we bring both the front office, back office and the network data into the solution. I mean to give you an example, right? If you think about it, you must be on some plan, right?
Let's say you are on some data plan and you keep hearing about these bill shock that happens for everyone as you travel around the world. Let's say you're going to Hong Kong on business and you're going to roam there. As soon as you land at the airport and turn your phone on, how about the operator with whom you have let's say you're using an operator here in the U. S, they have a roaming relationship or a relationship with somebody in Hong Kong, you turn the phone on or your tablet on, it quickly realizes you are here and offers you a day pass, unlimited usage day pass just for that in Hong Kong. And it goes away, right?
How do you do that? Because of the network that your home provider already knows where you are because once you turn your phone on, they know where you are, right? Yes. So how do you help customers do these kinds of things is where the intelligence has to be used and then connected to policy and then connected to billing and charging.
So it's going to be very difficult for someone that is kind of hardware based or whatever to kind of actually do that because this is software, correct?
This is also as I said to you earlier on and I think it's all moving very, very rapidly to software because and virtualization, it gives the customers the flexibility and choice and also their ability to deploy it in different business models. Many of the operators have their own internal clouds, their own data center clouds, compute and storage clouds. They want to be able to deploy and leverage those things. Yes,
yes. Interesting. And just driving on here a little bit like if you do that, I mean the amount data that you kind of create and have to deal with is huge. And you touched a little bit on the big data and then Oracle has obviously dealt with data all their life. Can you just talk a little bit about how that legacy or that heritage of dealing with U.
S. Data is helping you now in the telco space? Yes. And in
fact that is where if you think about it, we have a large experience of being the database in the enterprise and in the service provider on the software and IT side. And now the subscriber data management is something that's very key in the market. So we are bringing that kind of scale availability and mission critical aspects of the database that we have over the last many, many years now toward into the network. Yes. Okay.
Interesting. And the scale is massive, right? I mean we it's not just the number of subscribers, it's number of services, it's number of connections. And these data sets are massive. And I think that is where we leverage not only the database technology, but also our Exadata, where we can provide tremendous performance at much lower footprint and cost.
So are we talking like are we talking like peta what is it like terabyte? Is it petabyte? Or how big are these numbers there?
Yes. These are definitely more than terabytes and in some cases these
are petabytes. Yes, yes. Wow, okay. That is big, yes.
I mean, just think about, right, I mean, the number of subscribers and also we are in the beginning stages. Think about this. Today because today most of this is happening in a person to person interaction as our person to device interaction. Once this device to device interaction starts and picks up, Just look at yours like take an example, I mean you and your family you may have a couple of phones, a couple of tablets, but then look around your house, every device can be there are many, many devices around your house, whether it's security, whether it's home appliances, whether it's your and for example, one of the industries that we have had some success in is in telematics. So that machine to machine communication from your car for security services, for location based service.
So when you start seeing that, I think the data set grows exponentially.
And then so you didn't use the buzzword then, but the Internet of things?
There are many, many words over there, but if you look at it, whether it's machine to machine, whether it's device to device, whether it's Internet of Things, yes, I mean these are all if I look at it, all these things have to be activated. All these devices have to communicate and that communication has to be done securely in a quality way and your ability to bill and charge for those things. And that's it's something that we think we are in a very good position to work with our customers in that.
Yes. Okay, perfect. Let's shift gears and kind of move to the larger portfolio a little bit here. I mean, if I look at one of your last slides where you showed your whole comprehensive portfolio here now, it is very comprehensive at this point. But help us to understand how it all interacts, if you think starting with the front end and going to the session control?
And also the other question I have with that is like how do you get that across in the client conversation because you're very broad, but you're almost too broad for a single point of contact?
Yes. And I think it's you're right. I mean we have a large portfolio and I think it's like our customers expect, I mean single point of contact is something that they want from a relationship and a You cannot be a generalist in this space, right? You cannot be a generalist in this space, right? So we do have teams that's exclusively focused on whether it's retail or web.
We have teams that focus exclusively on whether it's now with acne on IMS and session delivery networks or with TeclaC on SS7 or diameter or policy or SDM or we have built. So I think the and also in the customer base, it's not one person, right? There's no one buyer because you have CTO organizations, you have CIO organizations, you have Chief Marketing Officers, you have Chief Financial Officers. So these companies themselves are very large and their business needs and the language that's spoken in these teams is very different. Yes, okay.
So our ability to but the way what we do is we have an ability to work with these teams, but then we do a it's a journey. We do our best in coordinating all of that in a fashion that for the customer and the buying cycle it all can come together.
Okay, perfect. I mean there I just kind of link in one of the questions I got from the webcast here. And that's if you as you go deeper into telco space, the buying center is changing somewhat. If you look at Oracle Enterprise sales to the CIO, now it's more the CTO who kind of thinks much more differently about complexity and things like that. How do you adjust it from a go to market perspective?
Sure.
So if you look at I mean in the communications business unit, I have a large sales force that has been selling to both the network side and to the IT side for quite some time, right? And now we have added more capabilities with Teclaec and Acme. So when we add these teams, we continue to invest in sales and the domain and also in engineering. So we have those relationships both at the CIO level and also at the CTO level and we continue to invest in those things. Okay.
Yes. So it's not a so we don't have our model is not we build all these products and throw all of that onto one guy's bag who's been calling on to the CIO over the last 10 years, right? So we have experts who call into the CFO. We have experts who call into the CTO organization. And now with Acme and Techolec, we've added tremendously good capacity and we will be investing more and expanding that reach on a global basis.
And that's just one of the things that we do is any of us, even I myself, we all came from smaller companies. Our capacity to go to market across the world is limited because of the cost it takes. But with Oracle, we have the ability. I can hire if I need to go after an operator in Nigeria, Oracle already has an office there. I can all I have to do is go and find the best telecom domain people there and hire them.
Yes. Okay. Yes. That's noted.
So I have the infrastructure to service the customer there. I have infrastructure on a global basis to provide support. See that the key thing is can I support these customers 20 fourseven in their site or remotely? That's something that we have a large support organization that we can tap into.
Yes. Okay. And another question from the webcast was like how do you think about the traditional players in this market like Ericsson, Nokia Siemens, Alcatel Lucent as Oracle pushes more like a software solution into the market?
Yes. I think the world is changing, right? It's a transformation that's happening. And I think as service providers are dramatically transforming themselves, I think if you look at the names of the companies you mentioned, I think radio and radio access is a big part of their business. And then some of them also do build operate networks or managed services is a very big part of their business.
So we are not in those spaces at all, right, today. So we focus on the portfolio that I talked about. And with some of them we partner sometimes and they are also trying to transform themselves. But I think we come from a very different point. We're coming from software for the last 35 years and the world is moving and the network is moving to the software.
Yes. Okay. I mean and I've got one last question I wanted to ask you that came from the webcast here and but I think it's a very important one is like can you talk a little bit about how the types of solution you kind of offer for the OTT players like if you think about an Apple Icloud or something like that?
So many of the over the top players even if they don't own the network, right? They still have the very same challenges. So we do have a large lot of over the top players with whom we work on either a unified communications, e mail, I'm chat or when they are rolling out these services, they have to provision the service, they have to monitor the usage of the service and then they have to bill for the service, right? So it's just because they don't own the network, that doesn't mean that they don't have the same problems. They also have a scale issue.
They also want to be able to reach customers anywhere in the world, right? Yes. So we work with many over the top players and many players who are taking their assets and digitizing it and moving on to the web, we work with them. So we have a business group here, which focuses on what we call nationals or enterprises, because many of these companies because there are many of them and they span many industries, so we have a generic term enterprise for it. And also now with Acme, it helps us because they're also providing solutions to these enterprises.
So yes, they all have the same problem even if they don't own the network. Yes.
Okay. Perfect. So in summary, if I like so it is I have to say what I've learned from the call now, it's a much, much bigger unit than I have before and the world is coming towards you in terms of the we're moving towards software here. That kind of Yes.
And I think we are playing a catalyst. So that's again given our investments and we are also being a catalyst in driving the change working with our service providers and they are very innovative providers around the world who are doing very innovative things and moving rapidly. So we I would agree with you. It is going software route and that's our DNA.
Perfect. Okay. Hey, with that, I don't have any questions more. I might want to hand it back to Shauna now. Thanks and thanks for having
me and I really enjoyed our conversation, Bhaskar. Thank you, Raimo.
To wrap up, I'd like to thank you for joining us today. Also, I'd like to extend a very special thank you to Raimo for moderating the Q and A portion of today's call and asking questions most asked by investors. If you have any follow-up questions, please contact the Investor Relations team here at Oracle. This concludes our call. Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude the conference for today.
Again, thank you for your participation. You may all disconnect. Have a good