Breaking Benchmarks with Microsoft and Redknee

By: Scott St. John - Pipeline

Think back to 2009. The U.S. was in the throes of The Great Recession and the first signs of hope had just begun to appear. In February of 2009, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Four days later, the president signed it into law making $787 billion (later increased to $840 billion) available to spur economic recovery, including $26.5 billion for broadband and other infrastructure projects.

In June of 2009, Pew Research published the Home Broadband Adoption Report which indicated a nearly 10 percent rise in home broadband adoption from the previous year across most socioeconomic classes. Thirty-four percent of the respondents cited they had subscribed to broadband services for "faster speeds," which was up from 29 percent the year before. Being retrospective, the significance of the data is that even in the darkest hours of the American economy in recent history, Americans were still willing to pay more for bandwidth. This growing demand for connectivity was further fueled by the launch of the iPad in 2010; the advent of tablet computing, mobile apps, and the whole shebang. Within a year, broadband connections boomed to an estimated 600 million globally. 

Fast forward just a couple years to 2012 and chuck in some things like LTE, 4G, OTT, M2M and several reiterations of the iPad, iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, and other bandwidth-hungry devices. These factors created an explosion in consumption, pervasive connectivity, an almost an infinite combination of connectivity, services, and devices. Communications Service Providers (CSPs) are now faced with an unprecedented volume, complexity, and demand for broadband data services which may be great for business but not so good for legacy systems. Scalability now moves to the forefront of CSPs' concerns and the need for a reliable reference point at which they can gauge the rigidity of their infrastructure becomes essential.

Karl Whitelock, Director OSS BSS Strategy, Stratecast Frost & Sullivan commented:

“The exponential growth of traffic that the industry is experiencing has been phenomenal, which increases the urgency for CSPs to interrogate the capabilities of existing transaction processing systems. The role of benchmark tests, which examines the most stringent operating environments and scenarios, are needed in today’s market in order to provide CSPs with a true picture of how their future investments in these and related business support systems will address their business strategies.”

The Rise of Benchmarks

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, a benchmark is defined as, "a standard by which something can be measured or judged." Historically, benchmarks are literally "marks" cut into stone for the placement of angling rods so that surveyors could have an accurate and definitive point of reference. I like this definition better. CSPs need a definitive and accurate point of reference by which they can evaluate the performance of communication technology products.

Being a bit visionary and true to their namesake, Oracle announced their advocacy for establishing industry benchmarking standards in January of 2009 and quickly got 

behind the TM Forum's (TMF) budding benchmark program. In a press release, they announced that their Communications Billing and Revenue Management application had achieved a benchmark of supporting 100 million subscribers. Liam Maxwell, vice president of products for Oracle Communications was quoted as saying: