REDKNEE ANNOUNCES BREAKTHROUGH CONVERGED BILLING RESULTS FOR 250 MILLION SUBSCRIBERS SCALABILITY AND SIGNIFICANT COST SAVINGS VALIDATED IN BENCHMARK TESTS
TORONTO – February 27, 2012 Redknee (TSX:RKN), a leading provider of business-critical billing, charging and customer care software and solutions for communications service providers, is pleased to announce at Mobile World Congress that its flagship real-time converged billing solution has been benchmarked to support 250 million subscribers. The performance benchmark sets a new standard for Tier 1 carrier-grade scalability, performance and exceeds the billing requirements for communications service providers (CSPs) that are looking to successfully monetize their investment in LTE 4G services.
Karl Whitelock, director OSS BSS Strategy, Stratecast Frost & Sullivan
commented:
“CSPs that are looking to capitalize on next generation services and business models, such as M2M, with their LTE and 4G networks, must look to the advantages of a high performance, multi-tenant, and scalable billing solution. Such solutions are essential to enable personalized pricing plans for retail customers, satisfy the challenges with wholesale partner agreements and deliver a high-value customer experience as operators monetize their investments. This benchmark test validates that a real-time converged billing solution can manage today’s demands and tomorrow’s business expectations.”
Lucas Skoczkowski, Redknee’s CEO commented:
“We are very excited to announce these results that set a new standard for carrier-grade scalability and performance with significant cost savings. As momentum for the deployment of LTE rollouts begins to soar, the ability to successfully launch these new services and business models will demand new requirements for a LTE 4G-ready billing system. At Redknee, we continue to invest in developing cloud-based and on-premise monetization solutions to enable service providers to increase revenues, improve the customer experience and grow profitability.”
Redknee conducted the test with industry leaders including NEC Corporation and X-IO technologies. Highlights of the benchmark test include:
Scalability to 250 million subscribers
The benchmark test successfully demonstrated the scalability and performance of Redknee’s TCB to 250 million subscribers. Scalability is an increasingly important requirement for billing solutions measured by: the number of subscribers including M2M devices; wholesale support of increasing numbers of partners; and scalability in the number of transactions that must be processed. In its recent analysis1, Stratecast showed that most CSPs see the need for billing solutions to address 50 million or more subscribers / M2M connections in the very near future, support thousands of partners and provide an ability to process 5-30 billion transactions per day. Taking into account the number of business solution scenarios either in the early implementation or planning stages for device connections within most industries, Stratecast believes the number of connected devices will exceed 60 billion globally by the end of the decade.2
Exceptional Performance with Significant Hardware and Software Cost Reductions Redknee’s TCB brings a high performance platform with significant cost reductions. When compared against hardware sizing estimations using hardware and available software licensing costs of leading equipment providers, the optimizations resulted in a significant solution reduction, including:
. significantly reduced physical Input/ Output (IO) Operations and
workload, therefore contributing to lower hardware costs
. significantly reduced datacenter footprint due to storage products
that seamlessly meld HDDs and SSDs
. 80% reduction in storage space through compression
. 70% reduction in database license costs, compared to the license
costs of other leading database providers
Processing power to meet 4G LTE demands When tested at 250 million subscribers, TCB processed 9.8 billion call detail records (CDRs) in a day. On average this means that 113,400 CDRs were processed per second, providing a platform that will meet the requirements to manage the expected exponential increase of mobile data traffic due to the rise of mobile-connected tablet PCs and the rise of machine-to-machine offerings.
In its report, Stratecast states that CSPs must be able to process at least
5 billion transactions per day as an essential requirement for today’s changing landscape. It agrees with the industry consensus produced earlier by Cisco3 that mobile-connected tablet PCs and the rise of machine-to-machine offerings alone will likely generate as much data traffic in 2015 as the entire global mobile network did in 2010. The analyst house adds that mobile data traffic will increase by a factor of 26 between 2010 and 2015, representing a 92% (CAGR) over this five-year period. The capability to process billions of transactions per day will become even more of a necessity when LTE 4G -based networks become fully operational.
1 Stratecast Global CSP Billing Part 2: Key Market Requirements Analysis, Sept. 2011
2 Stratecast Monetizing the M2M Services Revolution: Billing is a Cloud Experience, Dec. 2011
3 Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update,
2010-2015
For more information about Redknee and their solutions, please go to www.redknee.com.
About Redknee
Redknee is a leading global provider of innovative communication software products, solutions and services. Redknee’s award-winning solutions enable operators to monetize the value of each subscriber transaction while personalizing the subscriber experience to meet mainstream, niche and individual market segment requirements. Redknee’s revenue generating solutions provide advanced converged billing, rating, charging and policy for voice, messaging and new generation data services to over 90 network operators in over 50 countries. Established in 1999, Redknee Solutions Inc.
(TSX: RKN) is the parent of the wholly-owned operating subsidiary Redknee Inc. and its various subsidiaries. References to Redknee refer to the combined operations of those entities. For more information about Redknee and its solutions, please go to www.redknee.com.
About Stratecast
Stratecast collaborates with our clients to reach smart business decisions in the rapidly evolving and hyper-competitive Information and Communications Technology markets. Leveraging a mix of action-oriented subscription research and customized consulting engagements, Stratecast delivers knowledge and perspective that is only attainable through years of real-world experience in an industry where customers are collaborators; today’s partners are tomorrow’s competitors; and agility and innovation are essential elements for success. For more information, please go to www.stratecast.com.
About NEC Corporation of America
Headquartered in Irving, Texas, NEC Corporation of America is a leading provider of innovative IT, network, communications and biometrics products and solutions for service carriers, Fortune 1000 and SMB businesses across multiple vertical industries, including Healthcare, Government, Education and Hospitality. NEC Corporation of America delivers one of the industry’s broadest portfolios of technology solutions and professional services, including unified communications, wireless, voice and data, managed services, server and storage infrastructure, optical and virtualized network systems, microwave radio communications and biometric security. NEC Corporation of America is a wholly-owned subsidiary of NEC Corporation, a global technology leader with a presence in over 44 countries and more than
$37.5 billion in revenues. For more information, please visit www.necam.com.
About X-IO
X-IO is a recognized innovator in the storage industry. Its award-winning Intelligent Storage systems leverage over two decades of expertise to deliver unmatched price/performance for enterprise applications. The company’s plug-and-perform Intelligent Storage solutions are customer proven to Xcelerate transactional, reporting and business intelligence applications by a factor of 3X or more. X-IO Intelligent Storage drives Xtreme performance for virtual desktop and server infrastructures, while dramatically reducing storage costs and footprint. X-IO solutions have been recognized as SQL Server Pro and Windows IT Pro’s 2011 Editors’ Best Gold Medal winners, the 2011 Best of TechEd “Breakthrough Product” and “Attendees’ Pick” Awards, and inclusion in CRN’s 2012 Data Center 100 List.
They are used by over 1,000 enterprise customers.
For additional information please contact:
Press Relations:
At Mobile World Congress:
Sonus PR, Jenny Taylor
+44 7947 258 886
redknee@sonuspr.com
Redknee Solutions:
Ashleigh Young, Corporate Communications
+1 905 625 2733
David Charron, Chief Financial Officer
+1 905 625 2943
Investor Relations:
Matt Glover or Michael Koehler
Liolios Group, Inc.
+1 949 574 3860
