Oracle and Paetec Communications today announced that Paetec has deployed Oracle’s Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications, enabling the competitive service provider to more efficiently automate the full service delivery process, from sales and contracts right through to provisioning the service.

By deploying Oracle systems throughout its back office, Paetec also has enabled more rapid and efficient integration of U.S. LEC, the competitive services provider with which it is merging, said Bob Moore, Paetec’s chief information officer. Using the Oracle E-Business Suite will enable the company to have a single, consolidated view of customers as it continues to work to consolidate databases and merger OSSs, he said.

While Paetec has used Oracle systems in the past, including Siebel order management and customer care products, Portal Software billing and revenue management and MetaSolv service fulfillment products, using SOA applications to tie everything together “supercharges our relationship with Oracle,” Moore said.

And most importantly for Paetec, which differentiates itself in the competitive market by offering complex services tailored to enterprise needs, tying everything together enables rapid, paperless, automated ordering, Moore said.

“We have the sales force mechanized and the contract process mechanized, but then [the sale] goes to an order group, given how complex Paetec’s service line is, since we differentiate by being high-tech and high-touch,” Moore said. “The one piece that has been missing has been automated paperless ordering system. Generally how people do it is to pick your package, then someone in the back end takes it and connects the dots.”

Using Oracle SOA will also enable Paetec to continue its practice of providing profit assistance online, as that is integrated within the Oracle workflow of the sales process, Moore said.

“The sales reps take a building block approach from the ground up of what they are selling, and the costs are built into this,” he explained. “We do margin approvals based on that. What makes ours special, and one of the things that has always differentiated us, is the high-touch value collaborative sale. It enables us to keep really good margins and be good selling to the enterprises, which is one reason for churn that is industry low.”

By tying together systems using Oracle Fusion Middleware, account reps can sit down with customers and do point-and-click building blocks of service components to quickly process a completely customized contract, Moore said.

Paetec is rolling out these systems now and will connect them using the Oracle SOA applications by the first quarter of 2008. The company will be able to integrate U.S. LEC customers into the process, even before it moves billing data from the system that U.S. LEC used onto a different billing system that Paetec is using.

“The most disruptive thing you can do to a customer is change billing systems,” Moore said. “This way, the consolidated view of the customer lives within Oracle – all the workflow, ordering from business and systems perspective is all Oracle – things flowing in and out of billing system and in and out of the order system are all Oracle. That doesn’t mean we won’t consolidate our billing systems at some point, but we don’t have to do that right away.”