Breaking Benchmarks with Microsoft and Redknee

“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 TMF'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.”

To which Martin Creaner, president of the TMF added: "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.”

The 100 million subscriber benchmark announcement all but solidified Oracle's leadership position as the de facto choice for CSPs at the time. In hindsight, it pokes a little at Oracle's former relationship with IBM, which has since soured. This is best illustrated by the recent $10 million prize issued by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison for anyone that could prove that IBM could run database software even half as fast as Oracle's. The benchmark was actually conducted and achieved on IBM hardware in IBM's Labs in Beaverton, Oregon.

Not to be outdone, at Mobile World Congress this year, industry Goliath and IBM pals Amdocs announced that they had achieved a new benchmark of 220 million subscribers and touted it as the, "the largest benchmark customer base ever reported."  Clearly raising the bar, and more than doubling the previous announcement by rival Oracle.

The Dark Horse

Then an unexpected announcement resonated above much of the benchmark noise. Billing innovator and up-and-comer, Redknee not only jumped into the race, but took the pole position with partner Microsoft, by announcing breakthrough support for 250 million subscribers. This benchmark also raised the bar by showing near linear scalability at peak performance, processing an average of 1,249 invoices per second. The benchmark was conducted with Intel, Microsoft, NEC, Redknee, and X-IO Technologies. This combined solution establishes a leadership position by proving top-tier scalability for the combined solution--a place typically reserved for bellwethers Oracle and Amdocs.

“In today’s marketplace, it is typical for one customer to have multiple subscriptions. This is only going to become more prevalent as we see 4G/LTE networks roll-out, which will support new connected devices and the associated applications and the ecosystems that these create,” commented Lucas Skoczkowski from Redknee. “Ticking the ‘number of subscribers’ box is a first, but a crucial element of scalability that Tier-1 service providers need to consider. Agility, configurability and lower TCO must also be taken into account.”The test environment consisted of 15 quad-core NEC servers using Intel Xeon 7300 processors running the Redknee Turnkey Converged