Oracle leads push for billing and revenue management benchmark standards

Oracleâ Communications Billing and Revenue Management 7.3.1 had a recently completed extensive performance and scalability benchmark exercise by Oracle to demonstrate its ability to support 100 million subscribers. Scalability of this magnitude is vital to meeting the needs of tier-one communications service providers and those looking to consolidate multiple billing applications into a convergent platform.

Oracle will also propose a series of industry benchmark standards this week to the TM Forum through its Revenue Management Initiative. These benchmark standards will provide service providers with a consistent way to validate and measure the scalability performance of products marketed to meet the business requirements outlined by TM Forum’s Enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM) and Telecoms Application Map (TAM), with particular focus on the billing and revenue management segment.

For the complete benchmark results, please download the file from here:

http://www.oracle.com/industries/communications/pdfs/oracle-ibm-performance-benchmark-wp.pdf

Benchmark Details

*** Conducted at IBM labs in Beaverton, Ore., the benchmark included various workloads such as rating, billing, invoicing and customer service activities using a variety of plans modeled after real-life communications industry business processes.

*** The results demonstrated near-linear scalability from 33 million to 66 million, and to 100 million subscribers. At 100 million subscribers the application processed 176 million call-detail records per hour. Further, the test proved that the application can bill all 100 million subscribers in approximately 14 hours – meeting the needs of even the world’s largest service providers.

*** These results were four times higher than any achieved before and demonstrate the capability of the IBM Power 570 server and the Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management application running on the AIX 6.1 operating system to manage and deliver a real-life workload in a high-end production environment with excellent performance.

*** The benchmark tested Oracle’s application running on a database cluster of IBM POWER6 processor-based Power 570 servers, with IBM AIX version 6.1 operating system and IBM PowerVM virtualization technology, hosted by an IBM DS8300 storage subsystem.

“Communications service providers worldwide are increasingly concerned with business support system (BSS) performance and scalability. To ensure that service providers are best able to evaluate competing products, Oracle is strongly advocating for an industry benchmark standard – particularly one that builds upon the TM Forum’s work to define BSS processes by formalizing the objective evaluations of billing and revenue management applications on performance and scalability, among other factors. Oracle is ready to meet this challenge,” said Liam Maxwell, vice president of products, Oracle Communications.

“This industry has long lacked standard benchmarks to help communications service providers validate marketing claims, and measure and compare the performance and scalability of billing solutions. We applaud Oracle’s leadership in championing a billing and revenue management benchmark standard for the industry. This will complement the existing TM Forum Billing Benchmark Program, and we are excited to work with Oracle to deliver this value capability to our members and the industry,” said Martin Creaner, president, TM Forum.

“By conducting this benchmark, IBM and Oracle have verified outstanding performance and scalability of both Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management and IBM Power 570 servers. Service providers benefit from IBM’s server technology, which uses PowerVM – IBM’s industry-leading virtualization technology – to allow optimal flexibility, server consolidation and cost reduction,” said Scott Handy, vice president of worldwide marketing, strategy and sales support, IBM Power Systems.

White Paper: Performance and Scalability Benchmark: Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management on IBM PowerSystem 570, IBM System Storage DS8300, and AIX 6.1 Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management

About Oracle Communications

Oracle is number 1 in Communications globally with 20 of the world’s top 20 communications companies running Oracle applications. Oracle Communications integrates industry-specific BSS and OSS solutions with a standards-based service delivery portfolio, as well as the capabilities of Oracle’s industry-leading enterprise applications, business intelligence tools, and carrier-grade middleware and database technologies. Oracle Communications enables service providers to deliver next generation convergent services rapidly, increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, and reduce costs in the business and the network.

For more information, please visit: http://www.oracle.com/Communications

About Oracle

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world’s largest enterprise software company.

For more information about Oracle, please visit their website at http://www.oracle.com