As part of its ongoing bid to target telecommunications providers, Oracle took the wraps off Virtual PBX, a piece of its planned service delivery platform.

Generally available Monday, Virtual PBX is one of the deliverables Oracle committed to back in April when the vendor first laid out its SDP plans.

Telecommunications industry companies are coming under increasing pressure to adapt rapidly to mirror the ongoing convergence of data, voice and video services. To cope with the speed of change, carriers, network operators and systems integrators are moving their IT operations to a service-oriented architecture approach.

Oracle's SDP will offer telecommunications developers a single programming environment based on Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition, so they can build new services quickly and integrate and manage them with existing services.

An operator-hosted PBX service for small and midsize and larger enterprises, Virtual PBX enables the handling of incoming calls without major changes to a telecom network's underlying architecture being required, and makes it possible to offer specific bundles of telecom features to individual customers.

Oracle sketched out its SDP strategy in April, saying that some pieces of the platform already exist, such as its Fusion middleware and its Oracle 10g relational database, and pledging to release others, including Virtual PBX, later in the year.

As part of SDP, Oracle is expanding its middleware so users can access newer mobile, voice services and enterprise applications through traditional communication networks and networks based on IP Multimedia Subsystem and VoIP technologies.

Oracle has yet to commit to an exact time for when SDP will be complete.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.