Oracle Customer Success—NTT DOCOMO, Inc.

NTT DOCOMO Calculates Mobile Billings 10x Faster, Improves Service Quality, and Halves Maintenance Costs with Engineered System

By consolidating 350 database servers and storage systems onto Oracle Exadata, we gained a high-performance, reliable, and scalable mobile billing platform— enabling us to calculate billings data 10x faster, halve maintenance costs, accelerate system development, and support ‘+d’ initiatives.

— Tomoki Shimamura, Senior Manager Billing Systems Group, Information Systems Department, NTT DOCOMO, INC.

Founded in 1992, NTT DOCOMO (DOCOMO) is Japan's largest mobile service provider, delivering high-quality nationwide 3G network and ultra-high-speed 4G Long Term Evolution network to over 66 million customers. To promote and support the ‘+d’ initiative, a unified brand experience for DOCOMO’s services, the company combines resources—including customer database, membership details, and payment collection platform—with business partners to accelerate commercial distribution and deliver innovative products and services, such as flat-rate or mobile data sharing plan, to attract more new customers.

As part of its ‘+d’ initiative, DOCOMO designed and implemented a mobile billing platform (MoBills) to enable reliable mobile service, respond faster to operational requirements, and lower the company’s cost structure.

Business Challenge

Build a high-performance, cost-effective, and reliable database platform to enable rapid mobile charges calculation and support significant data growth over the next 10 years
Ensure high system availability, accelerate company response to customer requests, such as mobile-plan changes, and improve service quality
Reduce systems-maintenance workload and enable rapid application development to meet the ongoing business requirements of the company’s ‘+d’ initiative

Results

Halved maintenance costs and cut installation costs by 25% by consolidating 350 legacy servers and storage systems on 30 Oracle Exadata Database Machines
Processed mobile billings more than 10x faster by adopting a high-performing Oracle Exadata to accelerate system performance and support ‘+d’ operational requirements
Improved customer service by enabling real-time mobile charges calculation for a billion calls daily, and rapidly processing a million mobile service orders thanks to the integration of Oracle Exadata and Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture that ensures high system availability

Launched new services faster, such as a multi-number mobile service, by using a pre-configured and pre-tested Oracle Exadata to eliminate the need to test all components and enabling rapid application development
Simplified system management by deploying an integrated hardware and software engineered system rather than using a separate CPU, server, and storage for each database—enabling IT staff to easily monitor and identify root causes for system-performance issues
Enabled the company to quickly and easily assess the impact of MoBills performance in a consolidated environment and minimized risk by using Oracle Real Application Testing to automate stress testing for 400,000 SQL statements per second, a process repeated over 100x across multiple systems, including Oracle Exadata, Unix server, and Intel-architecture (IA) server
Reduced the company’s data-center floor space requirements and energy consumption with server consolidation

We chose Oracle Exadata for the integrated hardware and software platform without locking-in multiple vendors for mainframe or proprietary systems. By adopting Oracle’s latest technologies and products, we expect to reap significant benefits and support our ongoing business requirements.

— Akinori Inoue, manager, Billing Systems Group, Information Systems Department, NTT DOCOMO, Inc.

Execution

After running a pilot project to evaluate the combination of Oracle Database and Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture’s best practices, DOCOMO used Oracle Real Application Testing to assess the performance of Oracle Exadata, Unix server, and IA server during proof-of-concept. The test result demonstrated the high-performance and scalability of Oracle Exadata, and the company migrated the database servers for its mobile communications statement system to Oracle Exadata and the application server to IA. DOCOMO completed the project in approximately one year. It also upgraded the database servers for its billing statement system to Oracle Exadata in January 2016.

About NTT DOCOMO, Inc.

Headquarters

Tokyo, Japan

Employees

10,973

Annual Revenue

Over $5 Billion

NTT DOCOMO, Inc.

Partners

DOCOMO selected Oracle Platinum Partner NEC Corp. as the primary implementation partner for Oracle Exadata because of the company’s previous IT project experience with the partner and the group’s extensive knowledge of the MoBills system. NEC provided support for procurement, system design and installation throughout the project.

“NEC’s expertise and insight into our business and IT requirements helped to ensure a smooth transition to a high-performance Oracle Exadata,” said Tomoki Shimamura, senior manager, Billing Systems Group, Information Systems Department, NTT DOCOMO, Inc.

Oracle Solutions Used

Oracle Exadata Database Machine

Oracle Real Application Testing

Engineered Systems

Published: Feb 01, 2016