SCT AND SUN MICROSYSTEMS JOINT TEST BANNER SOLUTIONS

SCT's Energy, Utilities and Communications market unit announced results of a benchmark conducted with Sun Microsystems showing that utilities companies using SCT's Banner Customer Information System (CIS) can manage up to 9 million services. The performance evaluation was designed to represent utilities with a multi-million customer base subscribing to more than one service, such as gas, electricity, and water. Nightly cycles were processed representing typical cycles of 3, 6, and 9 million-services in less than 4, 5 and 6-1/2 hours, respectively.

"We see SCT's Banner solution as the clear choice for large operations and SCT as the market leader in serving multi-million, multi-service energy and commodity providers, in both regulated and deregulated markets," said Chuck Presto, account manager, Sun Microsystems. "As processes were tested from 3 to 6 to 9 million customers, these tests show that Banner demonstrated scale without performance degradation."

The benchmark was performed remotely through facilities at the Sun Enterprise Technology Center, Burlington, MA. SCT created a production environment with one Sun Enterprise 6500 server and three external Sun A3500 disk storage arrays. The E6500 contained 16,400 MHz CPUs and 8 GB RAM, while the combined storage used RAID 0 + 1 technology. SCT loaded the most advanced version of Banner CIS version 2.2.2 and Sun Solaris v. 2.6. Eleven processes including billing collection, charge generation, payment application and meter upload/download processing were run for iterative cycles of customers with multiple services representing the services mix of deregulation with complex rates as well as three years of history.

This study expands SCT's portfolio of benchmarks to 15 since 1993. Previous benchmarks with leading hardware platform providers been have conducted with Hewlett Packard, DEC, and IBM.

For more information, visit http://www.sctcorp.com.