Vodacom Finds Caché 10 Times Faster
Than Relational Databases
 |
With some 20 million customers, Vodacom in South Africa is the leading cellular communications company on the continent. As part of its ongoing commitment to customer service, the company recently implemented a Consolidated Information Management System (CIMS) that allows customer service representatives to trace messages that flow through Vodacom’s short messaging system (SMS). CIMS also provides statistics on short messaging traffic, allowing better capacity planning and revenue forecasts.
Vodacom asked its application provider, Atos Origin, to design the CIMS system. To meet Vodacom’s requirements, the CIMS solution had to interface with Vodacom’s existing back-end SMS application, handle peak loads of 8,000 database inserts per second -- and do so at only modest incremental cost. “Performance, specifically achieving the fastest database insert rate possible, was the main consideration for us,” said Phillipe Caille, chief technical officer of Atos Origin. “The company spent a considerable amount of time looking for the right relational database. Traditional databases proved to be too slow and costly. We found that running the CIMS module on a traditional database would require Vodacom to spend as much on a CIMS hardware system as they had spent on primary SMS hardware.”
That’s why Atos Origin was so pleased with a prototype it built using Caché. “We found the Caché-based engine to be between 10 and 15 times faster than the traditional database systems we tested. With Caché, the hardware required for CIMS cost between 5% and 10% of the price of the SMS hardware,” says Caille.
“We found that the Caché-based engine to be between 10 and 15 times faster than the traditional database systems we tested.”
--Phillipe Caille
Chief Technical Officer
Atos Origin
The CIMS solution has been a big success at Vodacom. According to Johan A. Engelbrecht, director of Vodacom, “Vodacom South Africa was recently rated the best-performing telecommunications company in a survey conducted by the South Africa government’s Department of Trade and Industry. It is through the innovative use of technologies such as Caché and the CIMS application that Vodacom has been able to win these accolades.”