Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing v2.5.x marked a major change in application technology as it is an all Java-based architecture. In past releases, both Java and COBOL were supported. Over the last few releases, COBOL support has been progressively been replaced to optimize the product.
In recently conducted performance benchmark tests, it was demonstrated that the performance of Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing v2.5.x, an all java based release, is at least 15 percent better than that of the already high performing Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing v2.4.0.2, which included the COBOL-based architecture for key objects, in all use cases tested.
The performance tests simulated a utility with 10 million customers with both versions running the same workloads. In the key use cases tested, Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing v2.5.x performed at least 15% faster than the previous release.
Additionally, Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing v2.5.x processed 500,000 bills (representing the nightly batch billing for a utility serving 10 million customer accounts being divided into twenty groups, so that 5% of all customers are billed each night on each of the 20 working days during the month) within just 45 minutes.
The improved Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing performance ultimately reduces utility staff overtime hours required to oversee batch billing, allows utilities to consolidate tasks on fewer servers and reduce data center size and cost required, and it enables utilities to confidently explore new business processes and revenue sources, such as running billing services to smaller utilities.
A whitepaper is available summarizing the results and details of the architecture used.