Sun Microsystems and International Turnkey Systems create solution to enable service for over 25 million telecoms subscribers

The new solution, which include ITS's flagship customer care and billing system solution "TABS", and Sun's server and storage technology, recently broke all previous records for performance and scalability in a public benchmarking exercise.

An increasing number of regional providers are now deploying the joint Sun/ITS offering.

"The Middle East's telecom sector has reached the milestone of regionally-based operators managing extended subscriber groups exceeding millions of customers, and the technology underpinning their networks must now be equal to the challenge of serving so many customers simultaneously," said Olivier Schaller, Sun Microsystems' Business Development Manager for the Communications Industry Middle East and North Africa

The joint offering from Sun and ITS enables telecoms providers to centrally deploy and manage the TABS customer care and billing solution for the provision of new customer contracts as well as addressing customer issues and monthly payments.

The software runs on Sun's high-end servers, with all of the data generated by the application being stored and protected by Sun's storage solutions.

In the recent benchmarking exercise, the system demonstrated that it could handle more than 450,000 customer enquiries/request for new services, assistance, and payments in a one-hour period (performed through a simulated 5000 concurrent users).

The benchmarking was conducted at the Sun Solution Center in Paris and Linlithgow, Scotland.

"Technology is a key differentiator in enabling regionally-based telecoms service providers to become more competitive with incumbent global operators. Our objective in benchmarking the joint ITS and Sun technology was to demonstrate that the Middle East's telecoms operators are putting the investments in place to manage and provide superior service to subscriber bases that exceed 25 million users, with capacity planning and scalability for even more customers as their market reach increases," said Mohammed Khafagy, Marketing Manager - Telecom Industry; ITS.