Amdocs hooked up with IBM recently to prove that real-time charging for prepaid transactions can be just as robust as traditional billing systems and less expensive as well. The company also hooked up with Analysys Mason to examine the practices of network planning.
IBM put Amdocs’ Convergent Charging platform through the paces on its BladeCenter servers and hit a new high-water performance mark of 230,000 transactions per second for real-time charging of complex prepaid events.
Amdocs said that both its new Turbo Charging technology, which uses a single technology to process and charge for any type of event, and its In-Memory Object Store, which provides the caching that reduces the requests on the database and file systems, are responsible for the performance leap.
“It shows that the new technology can support massive scenarios for prepaid,” said Rafi Kretchmer, product marketing manager for revenue management at Amdocs.
Two other features contributed to the new platform’s performance: pre-compiled rating logic code eliminates the resource intensive reading of XML files. And a massively distributed architecture eliminates bottlenecks familiar to centralized data management configurations.
While tomorrow someone else may set a new high-water mark, and there is no guarantee this performance will be realized in all implementations, the certification and benchmarking with IBM really shows something else: the charging product can run on lower-cost, energy-efficient hardware that is re-usable.
“The goal was not just performance,” Kretchmer said. “We wanted to prove you could reach the same level of performance over a low-cost architecture.”
