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Scalability is vital

Recent rate of mobile subscriber growth in India has been really astonishing; very few would have thought this till few years back and we really cannot predict even now how long will this sustain. Admittedly, there has been a steady decline in ARPU. This brings us to a question: How CSPs will satisfy the additional demand with only marginal increase in their operating expenses. We all agree that CSPs will definitely need to continue to provide even better overall customer experience if they have to run for long. Another aspect of this subscriber explosion is that very soon there could be huge demand for high-end services like mobile internet and TV. This follows from the simple principle that once basic needs (voice communication and text messaging) are fulfilled, people look for so-called ‘luxuries’ and slowly ‘luxuries’ become basic needs. Both of the above facts, increased subscriber volume and additional demand for newer services, have one thing in common. They both imply capacity of underlying network which provide the services as well as operation and business support systems should provide infinite scalability at marginal increase of cost.

 

If we think a little more on scalability we can understand why does scalability cost beyond our simple understanding that more equipments / servers imply more cost. Few things surface immediately:

1. Incremental cost of hardware types currently being used – We all agree that price/performance ratio of hardware elements vary. We will probably also agree that recent innovations have made commodity grade elements cheaper than other ones. The question of whether a critical system like Billing and Customer management should be run on commodity grade server clusters remains somewhat open. I personally tend to agree that with current level of technologies, open system cluster is a reliable and cost-effective way to grow.
2. Application capability – Chances are that you are spending money on ensuring that your billing and customer management COTS scale quickly by way of vendor performing software upgrades, additional on-the-field tests or creating replica instance on additional servers.
3. Redundancy – It’s simple. Along with capacity expansion of your primary setup, you need to augment your redundant setup also. Same is the case for your DR site setup.
4. Miscellaneous – Cost of future enhancements on applications tend to increase as the system load grows because of increased testing need and scaled up setup for test.

So, how do you reduce cost of scaling up? If we keep aside the hardware type issue, the answer is -billing and customer management application architecture should ‘naturally’ support infinite scalability. ‘Naturally’ implies that not only application should be scalable but future application enhancements should seamlessly support scalability. In essence, scalability is vital and way to reduce cost is to go for a well architected customer management and billing solution. We, at Zinnia Systems, are committed to provide you highly scalable and flexible customer management and billing products. Have a good day.
-Chiranjib Bhandary