Facts and More: the B4E Newsletter |
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B4E Solutions GmbH |
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Happy (?) New Year |
Yes, of course!
The team of B4E wishes a very happy, healthy, and successful 2004 to all of you.
It looks like 2004 is becoming a successful year for the industry: Siemens Mobile reports plus 35 %
in revenues for handhelds in IV/2003, Nokia’s sales are plus 16 % over the year, Sony Ericsson report
revenue increase of 16 % for IV/2003 along with a turn of the € 69 million loss a year before
into a € 43 million profit, Motorola triples its profit from 2002 to 2003 mainly in the last
quarter, CISCO is spreading optimism at the Davos World Economic Forum, Deutsche Telekom and France
Telecom are reducing debts faster than anticipated; Mr Ollila of Nokia seeing the “commercial breakthrough
of UMTS for 2004”.
And what about the BSS/OSS market? In 2003 again a couple of young, innovative and promising companies
disappeared. The Big Ones laid off substantial amounts of their staff – not only due to loosing big
clients; or major parts of their business was sold. Now, for 2004 “when to invest to be just ahead of
the recovery curve is the real challenge”, says CSG; Amdocs is already investing (into XACCT
Technologies); but: concerns of the financial analysts about widespread pricing pressures on billing
services are dragging down shares of Amdocs, Convergys, CSG, and others – while in light of the
positive news from the telecom market the share prices should grow substantially.
I believe, there is a lot to do in 2004: further streamline billing processes through the use of newer
concepts; enable your billing for new services like PTT; prepare the growth of mobile data services ...
From my point of view the key issue will continue to be implementing any improvement to billing as
efficient as possible – with cost reductions for the short-, medium- and the long-term. So much
loved “Financial Engineering” moves real cost only into the future. It hides what really needs to be
done: implement a billing system landscape using today’s technology in order to cope with your
market’s demand achieving a much greater efficiency. And typically such technology comes from the
young and innovative companies – or ?
All the best to you and your beloved for 2004,
Thomas Hartstang
12 million subscriber Benchmark with B-oo-levard® |
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In November 2003, B4E, together with Cap Gemini TMNG, completed a customer paid benchmark of
B-oo-levard® at the Sun Microsystems benchmark centre in Germany.
(1) Handle an installation with 12 million subscribers mirroring a typical and real business environment (e.g., tariff plans, discounts) on a Sun Fire 6800 with 96 GB of main memory (2) Prove full clientele capability for more than 550 independent service /content providers (ISPs) (3) Prove 100% transaction safeness (4) Update tariffs / products without stop and restart of the application (5) Perform reference data updates (EAI-transactions) against the running system without influencing the ongoing rating or billing processes (6) Demonstrate performance creating service provider bills (7) Demonstrate performance creating event record files for ISPs (8) Demonstrate performance creating various reports |
The Benchmark Results: (1) With the given hardware 12 million subscribers could be handled processing completely about 6 million event data records per hour (please refer to B-oo-levard®OneStepRating to understand our different approach to rating and billing) (2) Clientele processing was proven for all ISPs (more than 550) (3) Application and database were manually “stopped and restarted” – no data was lost (4) New tariffs were created, affirmed, and correctly processed against special Event Data Records without shutting or slowing down the system (5) Subscriber data, pricing schemas and more were changed using EAI transactions without any negative implication to the rating performance of B-oo-levard® (6) Bills for all 564 ISPs were created within 4 minutes while B-oo-levard® was continuing with rating in parallel; about 60 % of all EDRs were considered for these bills (7) A throughput of 10 million EDRs per hour for the files to be sent to ISPs was achieved while the rating process was running continuously in parallel (8) High spender report, daily revenue report, and state authorities inquiry were created within 5 to 8 minutes while the rating process was running continuously in parallel |
B-oo-levard® - more than just accomplishing |
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Copyright © 2004 B4E Solutions GmbH. All rights reserved.
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