We decided to share with you lessons learned, which we gain by migrating from Oracle BRM 7.5 to Oracle BRM 12 for one of our telecom company. First off all, why we did upgrade of the Oracle BRM billing system? There are mainly two reasons why we decided to perform this. First reason is to modernize the overall architecture and the second reason is to stay compliant with oracle licences.
Oracle BRM HA Availability
Current high-availability (HA) architecture has the following components:
- Diameter and MBI gateway.
- Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management System – BRM 7.5.
- Client applications (Customer Center, Pricing Center, Developer Center, Permissioning Center, etc).
Oracle BRM 7.5 architecture
New modern Oracle BRM architecture
Components of the latest, modernized Oracle BRM 12 architecture are as follows:
- Oracle Elastic Charging Engine (ECE) 11.3.
- Oracle NoSQL 12.
- Oracle BRM 12.
- Oracle Database 12c.
- Oracle Weblogic 12c.
- Oracle Pricing Design Center (PDC) 12.
- Oracle BRM Billing Care 12.
Key benefits of the new Oracle BRM 12 architecture
With adding new components such as Oracle Weblogic, ECE and PDC we gain in several areas. Oracle ECE contributes to the overall scalability part. There is an ever growing increase of request from various IoT devices and for that reason we need a fast and low latency rating engine, which can scale.
Another key area is also delivering notifications, which occur inside the billing system to external systems. The existing Oracle BRM notification framework is relying on Oracle AQ. However, notification system provided by Oracle ECE is using JMS queuing. With help of Weblogic JMS we can now bridge the existing Oracle AQ queue and leverage only JMS messaging. Oracle BRM 12 PDC is now a web based application, which can be accessed from anywhere and it does not need to be installed locally.
Oracle BRM 12 key components
- Oracle Elastic Charging Engine – is the main rating engine for online and offline charging for the BRM system. ECE is highly scalable because it leverages Oracle Coherence an in-memory data grid solution. It can process up to a couple of thousands of transactions per second. It also has built in diameter gateway component which is able to process request from the network
- Oracle BRM 12 – is a complete solution to capture, generate, collect and analyze revenue. The system is highly customizable and can fit pretty much any industry.
- Oracle Weblogic – is an application servers for building and deploying Java EE applications such as Pricing Design Center and Billing Care.
- Oracle Pricing Design Center – is a web based application for managing your pricing catalog. With PDC we can setup pricing for all the services and products that an organization is offering. PDC has it is own database schema which is synchronized with ECE and Oracle BRM.
- Oracle BRM 12 Billing Care – is a web based application for managing your customer base. It gives us the ability to create new customers as well as assign new services. Billing Care has its own SDK with help of which we can customize to fit the requirements of a business.
Conclusion
In this article we gave a brief overview of how we performed the modernization of Oracle BRM 7.5 and what components are being used. Moreover, in future articles we will go into more details for each of the components and describe how to set it up and describe the main features of Oracle BRM 12.
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