SAP Billing Package Shows Impressive Results In Benchmark Studies

SAP has announced the results from a series of benchmarks on IBM systems and storage designed to measure the scalability of the SAP Convergent Charging application. The application continuously processed over 7,50,000 records per second for real-time charging.

The tests simulated pricing for 200 million customers, a base that only very few of the world’s largest communication service providers (CSPs) actually have. The benchmark was performed with 12 IBM BladeCenter HS22 systems as the application servers, one IBM Power 780 system as the database server and one IBM System Storage DS8800 enterprise disk system.

As mobile and broadband have been rapidly adopted globally and the number of related services has skyrocketed, the billing process has become vastly more complex over recent years. Billing software needs to handle traditional services on both fixed-line and mobile networks for consumers and enterprise customers, as well as enable new services, such as video on demand and online collaboration, and cope with hybrid pre-paid and post-paid payment models.

CSPs are also becoming major players in providing cloud services, enterprise mobility, application stores and machine-to-machine solutions across multiple industries. Therefore, they must have the ability to process huge volumes of data in real time and produce invoices that customers can understand while providing them insight on their spending in the form of alerts.

SAP Convergent Charging and the SAP Convergent Invoicing and SAP Customer Financial Management packages form the SAP Billing for Telecommunications package. This pre-integrated billing platform was launched in January and supports the entire billing process chain.

SAP Convergent Charging can be deployed standalone as a modular adjunct to existing billing or prepaid systems. The application consolidates billing data from a variety of sources and prices each distinct transaction, whether a one-hour telephone call from a fixed-line at home, a five-minute mobile call from an international phone or an Internet search from a smartphone.

The prices calculated by SAP Convergent Charging are passed onto SAP Convergent Invoicing, which creates the invoice that is processed and issued to customers at the end of the billing cycle while generating payments statements for partners. SAP Customer Financial Management handles payments, collections, accounting and all financial-related communications with customers.

“The tests impressively demonstrate the best-in-class scaling capabilities of SAP Billing for Telecommunications. SAP helps communication service providers handle in real time the massive volume of data associated with billing for them to turn the current challenges into a huge competitive advantage,” said Jens Amail, senior vice president, Telecommunications, SAP AG.