Oracle Utilities Customer Care & Billing

Oracle Utilities Customer Care & Billing is the system of subscriber accounting and billing for the organization of the centralized calculations for multipower services for all types of consumers. It is intended for power supply companies, management companies, the distribution grid companies (regarding calculation of a useful holiday e\e), the generating enterprises (delivery contract management) and all energy suppliers and utilities (water supply, water disposal, gas supply, housing and communal services, etc.). Distinctive features: modern technology architecture, speed, scalability and flexibility. The solution Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing is included in the sector of leaders of "A magic quadrant" Gartner (Gartner Research, Magic Quadrant for Utilities Customer Management Systems, 2007).

The Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing 2.3.1 system showed unprecedented performance level in September, 2011, executing transactions on the hardware and software system Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2 — according to Oracle corporation, in a minute 16,500 invoices for payment were issued that equals to 993,240 accounts per hour. During tests the standard night cycle of the statement of accounts for the power supplying company with 1 million clients (47,600 accounts) was executed in 2.87 minutes, says Oracle.

As explained in corporation, the high rate of performance was reached, first of all, thanks to the increased capacity of a subsystem of input-output of the machine Exadata. The hardware and software system is distinguished, including, careful settings and the balanced computing modules, network interfaces and store cells of data. In general on Oracle Exadata Database Machine the most resource-intensive and important applications for data warehousing (Data Warehousing) and online transaction processing (OLTP) are executed nearly 10 times quicker, than earlier, claim in Oracle. For processing of one account the Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing system on Exadata needs on average only 48.5 transactions of input-output while to the database server which is not relating to the Exadata family — 73.7 such transactions are normal.

Testing was held on the database machine Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2 in Quarter Rack complete set with the software of Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Real Application Clusters, with the Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing 2.3.1 system which application server was deployed on the hardware Oracle Sun Fire X4770 server. In the test financial data in 12 months of activity of the average power supplying company from 1 million clients which 80% — residential consumers (households), 18% — commercial and 2% — industrial were used.

Tests showed that a system has the considerable potential for expansion and scaling. So, during tests the Oracle Exadata database server in Quarter Rack complete set (a quarter of a rack) with two cluster Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) nodes was used less than for 55% of power. "Testing showed that the hardware and software systems created for joint work and delivered to Oracle can generate invoices for payment of services much quicker, than it usually happens in the power supplying companies and at the housing and public utilities enterprises" — Linda Jackman, the senior vice president of the Oracle Utilities direction for development of products said.