New Oracle Communications Head Shares VisionNew Oracle Communications Head Shares Vision

Doug Suriano intends to better align the communications portfolio with Oracle Cloud, boosting its ability to serve the enterprise.

Oracle isn't likely the first (or second or third for that matter) company that comes to mind when you think of UC, but Doug Suriano, newly appointed head of the company's communications business unit, would like to get it in the running.

Doug Suriano, Oracle Communications

Suriano, who came to Oracle through the 2013 Tekelec acquisition, took on the position of GM and SVP of Oracle Communications in early May, filling the seat opened when former SVP and GM Bhaskar Gorti left the company for Alcatel-Lucent in January. Since then, he has pulled together the previously independent Acme, Tekelec, and OSS/BSS operations into a cohesive whole, the goal being to better serve its various communications constituents -- enterprises, service providers, content delivery networks, over-the-top providers, and mobile virtual network operators.

"We were serving a wide array of markets individually, and our customers were struggling to work efficiently with us. We saw synergy on the ... product front, as well as in development, consulting services, and marketing," he told me last week in a phone interview in which he shared his vision and strategy.

On the enterprise front, a new global sales force represents the entire communications portfolio, with help from channel and alliance partners in regions where the company doesn't have an adequate footprint, Suriano said. On the product front, the combined focus is on two areas: applications and network. The OSS/BSS, UC, analytics, and policy management products fall under applications, and the core signaling and session management products and application server comprise the network component.

Suriano said he built his strategy for Oracle Communications around the following five trends:

The link between the service provider and enterprise is a natural one to follow. "We see our portfolio as being applicable to both markets -- if we're helping an enterprise customer enable real-time communications with voice over IP or use WebRTC to enable their call centers, it's the same software that we're selling to service providers that are trying to do the same thing," Suriano said.

Pointing to the UC suite in particular, Suriano said he sees the cloud as an inflection point on Oracle Communications' journey to serve the enterprise market in a greater way. To date, the company has established a strong niche presence among organizations that need either highly scalable or highly secure email implementations, he said. "But I think once we move our UC suite into the cloud, which we have plans to do later this year, we see this as an area that can fill out really nicely."

Follow Beth Schultz and No Jitter on Twitter and Google+!
@nojitter
@Beth_Schultz
Beth Schultz on Google+