Breaking Benchmarks with Microsoft and Redknee
While their intent is good, benchmarks don't provide the complete picture. In fact, actual geographic benchmarks don't provide the complete picture either, but they do provide a reference point which surveyors can use to better analyze the landscape. It's really no different for communications information technology (CommIT). The benchmark should be taken into consideration with other key factors to provide an objective analysis of CommIT products.
If we compare the benchmarks from Amdocs and Redknee, there are a myriad of factors beneath the surface that can be scrutinized if one were to actually pop the hood and look. But, the net difference between benchmarks is only 30 million subscribers. And what's 30 million subs between friends? Let's face it too, if you throw enough hardware or money at any benchmark, you're bound to eventually reach it. Right? So what's the value of a benchmark if you have no point of reference to provide it with meaningful context?
CSPs need another metric to serve as a reference point to contextualize benchmarks. CSPs need a way to understand how the benchmark relates to their respective environment (and budget). The number of subscribers supported or achieved, by itself, is not enough. One way CSPs can better grasp the relative scalability of a benchmark solution is by understanding the total cost of ownership of the benchmark environment.
The 250-million-subscriber benchmark recently achieved by Microsoft and Redknee was reported (by Microsoft) to have been conducted at 50 percent of the hardware and software costs when compared to the industry standard. This savings was achieved by Microsoft’s SQL Server’s lower licensing and maintenance costs, and its ability to run on standard Intel Xeon boxes. Significant savings were also achieved by lowering overall management costs, lowering storage requirements due to database compression, and the linear scalability of the solution.
Microsoft’s Managing Director for the Telecommunications Industry Johan Norvik remarked, "We are thrilled by the results of the Redknee benchmark on SQL Server 2012 that further validate SQL
Server as the data platform on which you can bet your business, as it helps deliver predictable, linear, and next-generation performance. However, the key value that the solution delivers is
to help our joint customers win more customers and to scale the business while achieving a low TCO."
“Another important metric is how the system can scale. We demonstrated, in this benchmark test, that we can scale the solution to 250 million subscribers with near linear scalability,” added
Lucas Skoczkowski from Redknee. “This is important for communication service providers because it gives them the assurance that they will have predictable performance as the solution
scales, as well as providing a true
understanding of the total cost of ownership over the lifetime of the solution. These are key metrics that service providers are assessing when looking to make investments in their back-office systems.”
With the explosive demand for broadband services and the seemingly infinite combination of services and billing models, scalability is at the forefront of CSPs' concerns. However, while scalability may be the goal, savings may be the prize as the solution that supports the most subscribers at the lowest total cost of ownership enables both scalability and profitability. Profitability that can be used to fund innovation initiatives, promote competitive differentiation, improve the customer experience, and even subsidize billing transformation projects.
