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When I heard this name for the first time, I wondered if this is something to do with the interaction of AIA components between themselves until I joined AIA group. The term 'communications' here refer to the tele-communications. And again tele-communications just doesnt stop to a telephone. It extends to all the products that come under communication exchange - like telephone (landline, mobile, gprs, gsm, 3G, 4G, VOIP etc), internet (email, fax, etc) and all such media which are used to interchange the data between the entities.

AIA Communications is a telecom-domain integration which is intended to help integrate different products that are involved in the telecommunications.

Suppose an enterprise (say Oracell Corporation) wants to setup a telecommunications business. First we need to have the infrastructure setup - all the machinery like antennas, cables, telephone systems, switches, routers etc. Ofcourse, for functioning of these hardware, we need appropriate softwares.

There are different softwares involved in this setup for Oracell - for eg, to list a few:
a) To maintain Customers information it needs a CRM system.
b) To maintain the product information, it needs a PIM system.
c) To generate the bills, Billing systems are needed.
d) To manage the revenues inflow and outflow, Revenue system is needed.
e) To check the inventory, Inventory system (ERP) is needed.

Again, all these softwares are not just a single system. They involve multiple components from multiple vendors running across heterogeneous systems. Imagine the responsibility of the person / organization who maintains all these. Ofcourse, multiple persons involvement is all needed here, but the setup costs, integrating all these software pieces and making them talk to each other, and production-maintenance tasks are very high in this scenario.

Oracle AIA Communications provides a very easy way of integrating all these software components and reduce the costs drastically when compared to previous scenarios. AIA Communications provides out-of-the box integrations, thus, reducing the development & testing time and costs, integration costs, elimination of 3rd party EIA softwares etc. The administrator just needs to setup the required software and configure the integration packs. AIA communication seemlessly integrates most of the software components and helps each software talk to each other in a very loosely coupled way.

AIA communications PIPs (Process Integration Packs) are created using the AIA framework. So, it has all the advantages that AIA and SOA has such as loose coupling between the components, platform independence, architecture independence etc.

In my next entry, we will see how all these softwares function together in a enterprise telecommunications setup.