Oracle launched the first product in its “engineered-systems” category designed specifically for an industry at its annual OpenWorld 2012 conference in San Francisco Monday.

The Oracle Network Applications Platform is a pre-integrated hardware-software solution designed to deploy mission-critical communications services and applications. The product’s release is in response to growth in mobile traffic communications service providers now have to deal with.

Martin Creaner president and CEO of TM Forum, said network infrastructure was increasingly becoming a “global commodity with massive economies of scale. In engineering standards-based software and hardware together, Oracle is taking an important step toward the industrialization of network infrastructure.”

The system combines Oracle’s hardware and software products, including Sun Netra 6000 servers, Sun ZFS Storage 7320, Oracle Linux, Oracle VM, Enterprise Manager, Communications Service Availability and Clusterware.

Pre-integrated hardware-software systems, where hardware is assembled to support specific software, are key to Oracle’s strategy. Called engineered systems, this is a relatively new product category for the company.

The first products in this category were Exalogic (a hardware-software system designed to run enterprise applications), Exadata (a system designed specifically for database applications) and Exalytics (built to do data analytics). While overall hardware sales dropped 24% in Oracle’s fiscal Q1 (reported in September), engineered systems did well, the company said.

Mark Hurd, the company’s president, said the engineered-systems business had grown 100% during in the first quarter. “For the full year, we expect to double engineered systems sales to well over US$1bn,” he said.