Case Study: SK Telecom – Real Time Rating System

(RTRS)

CASE STUDY FOR TELECOMMUNICATION INDUSTRY

￭ Overview￭ Problems￭ Solutions￭ Results￭ Technical Details

AGENDA

CASE STUDY FOR TELECOMMUNICATION INDUSTRY

In-Memory Database Solution

+ Overview

AltibaseAltibase is provider of In-Memory data solutions for real-time access, analysis and distribution of high volumes of data in mission-critical environments.

SK Telecom SK Telecom is the largest mobile service provider in South Korea. It had 50.6% of market share representing over 50 million subscribers in 2010.

SummaryAltibase helped SK Telecom to eliminate revenue loss from undetectable free usage and uncollected negative balances while increase customer satisfaction. ALTIBASE HDB delivered the performance, reliability and functionality for SK Telecom while significantly lowering TCO.

In-Memory Database Solution

+ ProblemsSK Telecom utilized a legacy, mainframe-based IT infrastructure for its Real Time Rating System (RTRS).

In 2002, SK Telecom identified the limitations of its legacy system. SK Telecom’s billing service suffered from major delays as the number of

subscribers grew. The sheer number of increased billing placed strains on the legacy systems1.

With growing demands on the legacy system, total cost of ownership (TCO) became progressively onerous.

SK Telecom was unable to detect and shut-off service when prepaid balances were depleted.

The inability to accurately detect customer balances resulted in negative balances and uncollected funds.

1) Average of 20 days from creation and delivery of customer bills. In-Memory Database Solution

+ Solution SK Telecom adopted ALTIBASE HDB In-Memory DBMS in 2002

for its RTRS.

ALTIBASE HDB delivered the performance, reliability and functionality for SK Telecom while significantly lowering TCO.

In-Memory Database Solution

+ Results SK Telecom has the system performance to precisely check and act on customer balances1.

SK Telecom has the capacity to process customer usage on a per-second basis. This dramatic shift provides substantial savings to customers igniting new marketing channels2.

Revenue loss resulting from undetectable free usage and uncollected negative balances are eliminated.

Customers have access to their balances in real-time and without error.

Customer satisfaction, loyalty, retention and acquisition are maximized.

SK Telecom replaced its aging and expensive mainframe-based legacy system with an open UNIX platform lowering TCO.

SK Telecom has the ability to efficiently integrate billing services for subscribers using multiple services3.

1) The new system is 5.3 time faster than the legacy system with the added benefits of High Availability (HA) and replication.

2) Per-second charging scheme saves SK Telecom customers an average of 14.5 million USD per annum.

3) SK Telecom acquired Hanaro Telecom in 2007 to offer internet services with SK Broadcom division. In-Memory Database Solution

+ Technical Details SK Telecom achieved outstanding results with their new Real Time Rating

System (RTRS) by leveraging the key features of ALTIBASE HDB, specifically in the areas of high-performance, high availability and open platform.

ALTIBASE HDB ALTIBASE HDBReplication

Rating Server 2

Oracle DBMS

Rating

Process

Rating Server 2

Rating

Process

In-Memory Database Solution

+ ALTIBASE HDB Performance Before the new RTRS, powered by ALTIBASE HDB, was put in production, SK

Telecom’s old billing and rating system was built and operated on a legacy IBM mainframe with an IBM DB2 DBMS in the back-end.

The legacy system only allowed billing and rating processes to execute in batch/day processing windows. Increasing number of subscribers and the introduction of new services resulted in an unmanageable number of database transactions, making batch-mode operation impossible.

Furthermore, new services (i.e. Pre-paid) came with additional requirements demanding SK Telecom to detect and manage usage balances in real-time -impossible with the legacy system. SK Telecom could only achieve a throughput of 150 million calls a day while the system resource utilization was maxed out.

In-Memory Database Solution

+ ALTIBASE HDB Performance SK Telecom designed its new RTRS using a combination of ALTIBASE HDB and

Oracle DBMS instances. ALTIBASE HDB was deployed in-memory DBMS mode to host recent data (up to 3 months old) as a front-end to an on-disk Oracle DBMS which was used as the repository for hosting historical data.

Data integration between ALTIBASE HDB and Oracle was achieved by using Altibase’s OraAdapter tool. The new system allowed billing and rating processes to execute in real-time. This real-time process was critical for pre-paid services since SK Telecom had to accurately detect negative customer balances.

In addition, the new system achieved a throughput of 450 million calls a day while system resource utilization was only at 50%.

In-Memory Database Solution

Open Platform High Availability (HA) With a mission-critical system built on a

legacy mainframe platform, SK Telecom faced difficulties in several areas. Due to high system procurement, upgrade and ongoing incremental maintenance costs, TCO was unmanageable. The legacy system did not offer flexibility for new application development. SK Telecom had a pool of application developers and administrators who were trained on legacy mainframe systems, and the net result was more wasted cost.

ALTIBASE HDB was the textbook solution. As an open system, it allowed SK Telecom to move to a UNIX based platform. As a standards-compliant DBMS, it enabled SK Telecom to take advantage of a readily available, large pool of application developers and administrators at low cost.

Using the built-in replication feature, SK Telecom implemented ALTIBASE HDB based on Active-Active HA architecture. In this architecture, there were two instances of ALTIBASE HDB configured to simultaneously service different rating servers with improved reliability and fault-tolerance.

In-Memory Database Solution

In-Memory Database Solution

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