SDP stands for Service Delivery Platform, the new support system for telecommunications carriers designed by Oracle.

The platform is designed to assist carriers, network operators and system integrators transition to service-orientated architecture. Oracle tries this way to assist enterprises in reducing the time and costs to deploy new voice data and integrated multimedia services on existing and next-generation communication Internet Protocol (IP) networks.

With the provided platform enterprises are expected to be able to extend their communication infrastructure, assuring this way a strong foundation for new Voice-over-IP (VoIP), mobile and real-time applications.

Vodafone or Nextel already use Oracle applications or infrastructure. US and European mobile operators deploy Oracle database and most of the world’s top 20 communication companies use applications provided by the database giant.

SDP plans to extend Oracle Fusion Middleware for network-centric applications by enabling users to access next generation mobile. Some pieces of the SDP are already available. The platform includes Oracle 10g relational database, real application clusters and Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database aquired in June. The IP multimedia subsystems are enabled through HotSIP and Net4Call is used to support legacy networks.

In the future, additional functions will complete the platform later this year. The integration of existing services and the deployment of some new ones is going to be done a lot more faster as the strategy is going to provide a programming environment based on J2EE.

Though there are some new features in development, SDP is going to be set to support Oracle Application Server and the BEA Systems and JBoss.

And as the project is not done yet, carriers can expect other products as well as Oracle is also building a service delivery platform based on industry protocols.