Oracle Scales Up Billing for 10 Million Enterprise Accounts

Communications service providers (CSPs) are quickly upgrading their billing systems to monetize growing demand for enterprise services including 5G-enabled internet of things (IoT) solutions. To succeed, CSPs will have to scale to concurrently support multiple pricing and payment models across large employee bases or millions of IoT devices.

Helping CSPs address these demands, the Oracle Communications Cloud Scale Billing solution was recently put to the test. Running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and using Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE), the solution completed a bill run for 10 million accounts across eight representative CSP enterprise customers in 4.5 hours. Oracle achieved a processing throughput of 2.29 million accounts billed per hour and 680,000 accounts invoiced in eight minutes, representing a 94% reduction in bill run completion time.

“Demonstrating efficient high billing throughput is critical to monetizing 5G, achieving faster time to revenue, and in delivering a high level of customer experience,” said Karl Whitelock, IDC research vice president communications service provider – operations and monetization. “This bill run simulation shows that the Oracle Cloud Scale Billing solution has the linear scaling and predictable performance required to address the rigorous capabilities CSPs need for addressing the complexities found in many B2B and B2B2x use cases.”

Cloud Scale Billing is a cloud native billing and revenue management system with the flexibility and breadth of capabilities to manage subscriptions, bills and invoices, collections, payments, settlements, and receivables. The solution is part of Oracle’s Cloud Scale Monetization portfolio of charging, billing, and revenue management solutions that enable CSPs to support any service, payment, or business model across any network generation.

High throughput with cloud scale efficiency

The performance test was designed to replicate the rigorous billing workloads and account hierarchy structures that CSPs must manage as they serve their enterprise customers with industry-specific solutions, whether that be large-scale IoT business scenarios or large enterprises with million plus employee bases. The test used real-time insight into Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management’s CPU utilization for dynamic, linear Kubernetes autoscaling. It also reaffirmed the value of the solution’s cloud native architecture in helping CSPs optimize their compute resources and cloud costs.

To put this in perspective, in the same 4.5-hours used to complete the performance test for 10 million accounts, a CSP could complete a bill run for the world’s largest enterprise (2.3 million employees) plus 100 Fortune 500-sized companies, simultaneously.

“This achievement demonstrates that Oracle’s Cloud Scale Billing can manage diverse, complex hierarchical structures inherent in enterprise billing at tremendous scale,” said Jason Rutherford, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Communications, Applications. “CSPs are empowered to accelerate and monetize innovative 5G-enabled enterprise services, while also ensuring revenue accountability and maintaining a predictable cost of ownership.”

With OCI, CSPs pay for compute capacity only for the seconds that their instances are running, meaning CSPs can reduce their cloud costs by scaling up billing only for the hours per month needed to complete the bill run.

View the full performance report here.