SYSTEMS

Sun Microsystems is implementing the world's largest SAP customer account solution for Deutsche Telekom. This solution will replace a Siemens installation based on 15 RM 600 servers. The SAP-based customer management system is one of Deutsche Telekom's core applications serving 20,000 users to coordinate critical business processes for 40 million fixed line customers, ranging from payment handling to complaint management and the payment reminder system. The data volume is currently nine terabytes from 250 million data records. By upgrading the SAP system and standardizing on Sun hardware, Deutsche Telekom will realize at least 50% reduction in development and operating costs, drastically reducing technical faults, and optimizing the process chain and personnel deployment in the entire Customer Relationship Management sector. To achieve this, Deutsche Telekom consolidated all customer account installations onto an entirely new Sun hardware systems, migrated to the SAP R/3 4.7.1 release and reorganized company billing services. "After over a decade in operation, our existing EDP solution had reached the limit of its capacity. There were simply too many technically-driven error messages and too much downtime," according to Peter Sother, manager at Deutsche Telekom's Vendor and Relationship Management, Billing & Collection department. "Our new architecture provided cost savings in excess of the anticipated 50 percent target. The number of technical events has dropped to zero. While the initial sizing already promised 30 percent greater performance in terms of availability, dialogue response time and batch run times, the optimization measures resulted in further performance gains to the factor of six." In 2001, the project contract was initially awarded to IBM, which proposed three different hardware solutions based on the Linux operating system and the DB II database, as well a mainframe for the database application and AIX for the application servers. During the introductory phase of Deutsche Telekom's cost optimization program, a comparative study was completed comparing the previously selected IBM solution with a Sun Microsystems server architecture including an Oracle database. "The Solaris based solution proved significantly more cost-effective, reducing the complexity of the infrastructure thanks to a uniform architecture for the database application and other application servers," Sother said. The outgoing architecture, based on Siemens' RM 600 systems, was consolidated onto a total of four Sun Fire 15K servers running the Solaris operating system and leveraging the Sun Cluster 3.1 software. Together with two Sun StorEdge 9980 storage systems, this complete Sun solution forms the basis of the world's largest SAP IS-T industry solution telecom installation. In addition, Deutsche Telekom utilizes the file systems and volume manager tools in the Solaris OS. In the future, Deutsche Telekom plans to consolidate additional applications onto the new infrastructure. For example, by mid 2005, all premium billing services relating to numbers ranging from 0190 to 0800, as well as the billing chain's central incoming order management portal, relating to numbers ranging from 0190 to 0800 will be transferred to the Sun SAP platform.