Highdeal, the world’s leading provider of pricing & rating solutions, has recently announced a significant breakthrough in the online charging systems that telecom operators use to manage revenue for converged, multimedia services. Highdeal teamed with HP to show that the combination of Highdeal Transactive®, HP Internet Usage Manager (IUM), and HP ProLiant servers running Linux delivers a price-performance profile previously unattained by online charging solutions.

In tests conducted at the HP Solutions Center in Richardson Texas, the combined Highdeal-HP solution delivered four times higher throughput and half the latency of any other published benchmark.

Specifically, the combined Highdeal and HP systems performed charging control, rating and balance update operations with end-to-end transaction rates of 24,000 transactions per second (TPS) for session-based charging with an average latency of 23 milliseconds per transaction. In an event charging scenario for messaging services, throughput climbed to 49,000 TPS with average latency of 8 milliseconds. The results are particularly striking since the HP ProLiant servers in the test cost approximately 50 times less than other servers typically used by telecom operators for their online charging applications.

Commenting on the benchmark, Fergus O’Reilly, Highdeal’s CTO, said, “We are proud of these compelling results that are a direct outcome of a continuous process of careful architecture design and optimization by the Highdeal R&D team and the HP IUM product group. They demonstrate that the combined Highdeal and HP IUM solution can scale to very large subscriber volumes and manage innovative pricing and convergent account offers, while scaling gracefully using cost-effective hardware.” The benchmark used real-world pricing and charging scenarios with a customer base of 20 million subscribers. Each modeled subscriber used next generation voice and data communications services priced using sophisticated bundles of time and zone-based tariffs, free-units and cross-product bonuses. Charging was done dynamically among each subscriber’s prepaid, postpaid and credit-limited accounts.

“Our combined online charging system (OCS) solution drives down the cost of new service rollouts today, and provides an open, future-proof platform for high transaction-volume processing—exactly what our customers have asked for as they deploy IMS-compliant Service Delivery Platforms,” commented Nigel Upton, HP IUM General Manager, HP. In the tests, Highdeal Transactive provided the pricing, rating and online balance management. HP IUM Charging Manager contributed the real-time session management, charging control and quota management using the Diameter Credit Control Application (CCA) protocol for the service scenarios. Both applications ran on HP ProLiant servers.

Both Highdeal Transactive and HP IUM support horizontal scalability to increase overall capacity by distributing the load gracefully across multiple hardware servers. This is in marked contrast to many competing solutions that support only vertical scalability on large, high-end servers. The Highdeal and HP IUM approach provides high performance per dollar spent and much lower total cost of ownership. Highdeal Transactive R4.0 ran on 5 HP ProLiant DL380 G5 servers, each with 2 x 2.66 GHz dual-core Intel Xeon CPUs. HP IUM Version 5.0 ran on 4 of the same servers. The operating system used was RedHat Enterprise Linux 4.0. The solution is also supported on a wide variety of other platforms, including HP-UX, Microsoft Windows and many others.

About Highdeal
Highdeal is the world’s leading provider of Pricing & Rating solutions. By delivering unconstrained pricing and packaging flexibility coupled with real-time transaction management, Highdeal solves the billing problem in the multiservice world. The Yankee Group has named Highdeal the fastest growing billing and rating vendor defined in terms of announced customers. With over 180 implementations in more than 50 countries, service providers around the world rely on Highdeal. For more information, visit www.highdeal.com.