OREANDA-NEWS. October 5, 2012. GMCS and Microsoft informed about the evaluation results of the productivity of integrated solutions MECOMSTM for energy companies and Housing and public utility companies, certified for Microsoft Dynamics AX. Evaluation work carried out on the test stand, held at the Moscow Technological Center of Microsoft Company with using of HP equipment.

This project is the continuation of the joint initiatives of Microsoft and GMCS in the energy sector aimed at creating of the innovative integrated solutions for enterprise automation of industry (sales, generation, networks) and information service for different groups of consumers of utility services – industrial, commercial and governmental entities and citizens. The relevance of the investigation determined with the growing demand of Russian energy companies and utility companies in the powerful and reliable tool that can not only provide an efficient service of all customer groups with the cost reduction of service providing, but also to increase satisfaction with the quality of service and staff productivity in conditions of the modernization of public utility services market.

The results of this work confirmed the reliability and quality work MECOMSTM in conditions closed to real work in the company of the standard customer - energy supply company that is serving 2 million clients and 5 million metering device. It was determined that MECOMSTM shows high productivity, speed and fault tolerance with the volume of data 1.39 TB (2,64 billion records) and simultaneous work of more than 3000 users. During the simultaneous work of clients MECOMSTM allows for one hour to perform more than 15 000 operations of a new payment input, hold more than 16 000 operations for customer identification and comparison with the existing patch, run more than 32 000 operations and create new metering devices. During batch data processing the solution provides a one-time import of around 200,000 payments, automatic mapping of 40,000 payments to existing invoices, forming and posting of 160,000 invoices, automatic input 200,000 meter readings.

These results show that the system MECOMSTM can be used by the largest Russian energy companies as a reliable business tool to support the core processes of customer utility service: collecting meter reading and verification, forming and billing, matching, contracts management, handling complaints and enforceability of activities, analytical reporting.

Meanwhile, a number of major energy companies in the world uses MECOMSTM, serving 1.5 million clients to 25 (commercial and house customers) . Among these are the second-largest Belgian Energy company SPE, Nidera (Argentina), RWE (Denmark) etc.

"We are actively working in the alliance with Microsoft on ways to provide the Russian energy companies the most advanced solutions to automate activities. MECOMSTM answers the requirements of the Russian electricity market and features of the Russian legislation. Today, one of the largest energy holdings in the country – "RAO Energy System of East" – within the project of utilities infrastructure modernization -chosen MECOMSTM as the basis for building a modern billing system, – said Oleg Lysov, vice president of GMCS. – We are satisfied with the results of the evaluation of system performance, and we hope they will be useful to energy companies in planning their IT infrastructure to provide a reliable service in the performance of "heavy" mass operations on large amounts of data."

During the investigation the specialists also found the optimal hardware and software configuration for the solutions operation, generated recommendations for node configuring of hardware and software complex. It was confirmed that the stock of MECOMSTM productivity combined with the selected equipment can increase the number of concurrent users of the system to 6000 or more. In conditions of a significant load on the system, the response time of the user interface in the implementation of the standard operations is minimal (on average less than 3 seconds for simple forms). Thus, in the conditions of the increase in business temp and the customer base, MECOMSTM ensures consistently high quality of the customer service.

For the solution assessment the test stand based on the equipment Hewlett-Packard was performed at the Moscow Technological Center of Microsoft (MTC). It consists of 38 virtual servers AOS based on the model HP BL 460G7 and 11 servers of test agents on the base model HP BL 460G7 and the database server – HP DL 980G7 8 * 8 RAM 1 TB. Testing was carried out in accordance with the developed scenarios. Load modeling was carried by emulating real user experience of key business processes, implemented in MECOMSTM. Also specialists conducted special tests that simulate the load on the system with the mass document processing, and testing of the user interface productivity.

"Large corporate customers choose Microsoft Dynamics AX more often as the operating platform of the business. It refers to the distribution and retail, and it is true for industry and energy. Testing once again confirmed the high scalability and availability of large amounts of data. The new version of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 perfectly proved itself in the corporate segment, we introduce its latest update R2 on the Russian market in December of this year", – said Julia Barabanova, Director of Microsoft Business Solutions Russia in the work with corporate clients.

"We in HP Russia are pleased that MECOMSTM system is developing, whose promotion in the Russian market by the company GMCS, and high-performance results, which the system shows at work on industry-leading blade servers HP ProLiant BL460c and servers of standard architecture for business-critical applications, HP ProLiant DL980, – said Alexei Murzov, Manager of virtualization technology development and database alliance HP-Microsoft. - We hope that users of the system will mark the offered opportunity to improve efficiency of energy supply companies business."