IT firm Oracle announced an agreement to acquire GoAhead Software (News - Alert), a provider of packaged service availability software for the communications industry.

The company did not disclose the financial details of the acquisition.

 Leveraging the combination of Oracle (News - Alert) and GoAhead technologies, network equipment providers (NEPs) will be able to provide a comprehensive and integrated offering that delivers service availability across telecom solutions.

 “NEPs are moving to a standardized software and hardware platform that can deliver and manage highly available services,” said Nigel Ball, vice president, Oracle Communications Industry Solutions. “GoAhead software is the leading commercially-available solution that is compliant with Service Availability Forum specifications, the most widely adopted standard for service availability software.”

GoAhead Software’s carrier-grade software speeds the time to market and reduces the cost and risk of carrier-grade services that need to be always available, company officials said.

The addition of GoAhead technology is expected to assist Oracle Communications Industry Solutions to deliver a comprehensive, standards-based, carrier-grade platform that supports the delivery of new services in the call path of the network.

This service availability also delivers the highest level of service up-time required for real-time network applications that are in the call path of communication services, company officials said.

 “With over 100,000 deployments of GoAhead software by leading NEPs, GoAhead brings significant domain knowledge and engineering strength, coupled with a strong track record of delivering solutions to global network equipment providers,” said Asif Naseem, president and COO, GoAhead Software, in a statement.

The transaction is subject to closing conditions and is expected to close before the end of 2011. Until the deal closes, both companies will operate independently.    

Recently, Oracle announced that Helm Bank, a Colombian financial institution, selected Oracle software and hardware to run its core banking, customer-facing services and marketing functions. Oracle database machine provides extreme performance for both data warehousing and online transaction processing applications.