Oracle supports 100 million subscribers with Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management

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.

In addition, this week Oracle will propose a series of industry benchmark standards 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.

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.