DIGIQUANT SOLUTION SETS NEW RECORD PERFORMANCE FOR REAL-TIME RATING.

Digiquant, a global provider of software infrastructure for the communications industry, announced recently the results of the performance testing of version 4 of its Internet Management System (IMS) software. The testing established new benchmarks for multiple IP service rating scenarios, including those for content, post-paid Voice over IP (VoIP), and pre-rated prepaid VoIP sessions, validating the ability of the solution to rate in real-time more than 1.3 billion events per day.

The testing, utilizing IMS 4 with Oracle 8.1.7, was conducted in December 2001 at the European Performance Center of Hewlett-Packard Company in Bblingen, Germany, on a 64 CPU HP Superdome running HP-UX 11i. The test system was configured with a database containing 25 million subscribers.

Digiquant's IMS 4 is a multi-service platform capable of delivering a convergent billing solution for carrier class providers. The testing covered three real-time rating scenarios and performance testing that highlighted the linear scalability of the software. As more CPUs were added the performance of the solution scaled proportionally.

"This latest benchmark quantifies what we at Digiquant already knew about the performance capabilities of IMS 4. We have an outstanding solution capable of handling the enormous number of transactions that will be created by the emergence of mobile Internet services and the growing demand for IP services such as Internet Telephony and content," said Hasse Rasmussen, founder and chief technology officer, Digiquant.

The first scenario simulated the rating of simple events such as the purchase of content where the price is pre-established. The test results for this scenario verified the rating and processing of 16,000 incoming Call Detail Records (CDRs) per second. In actuality the result reflects the processing of 48,000 records per second. For each incoming CDR, the processing included persistent storage of the CDR, generation and storage of a billing event record, and updating of the account balance.

The second test was based on the rating and processing of complex events, in this scenario post-paid VoIP calls that included rating parameters and a telephony numbering plan. To rate the calls the system had to match the origin and destination of each call and apply a tiered rate plan. The results achieved in this scenario were 12,000 complex events per second.

The third scenario focused on the most complex of real-time processing: prepaid VoIP transactions, which again involved the application of a telephony numbering plan and tiered rate plans. Each call in the study included a pre-rate request based on call source, destination number, and account balance information, as well as a rate request that included a balance update and the writing of both a CDR and a billing event record. In this scenario, IMS was able to rate more than 5,000 sessions per second, shattering the benchmark of 3,000 sessions per second set in November of 2000 by the IMS 3.2.1 software.

In addition to performance metrics, the variety of scenarios tested further validates the multi-service management capabilities delivered seamlessly from a single platform via the IMS Service Framework. General availability of IMS 4 was announced in early October of 2001. Since its availability, nearly a dozen service providers have selected IMS 4 as the platform for creating and managing multiple IP service offerings. [sections]