Oracle dominates the database software space, but recent enhancements made by software company EnterpriseDB to open source alternative Postgres mean it is now reliable enough to use for telecom OSS and BSS applications.
Founded in 2004, EnterpriseDB (EDB) is a major contributor to the Postgres project. It also sells subscription products which provide additional Postgres capabilities, including faster backup recovery, management at scale, high availability, geographic distribution and integration with various enterprise environments. Additionally, it offers Postgres as a service on Microsoft’s Azure cloud, with plans to do the same on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.
EDB CTO Mark Linster told Fierce Postgres can be used for anything of a transactional nature, including call data records, metering, invoices and more. For telecom specifically, that means it can be applied to OSS/BSS use cases and even packet core management.
Linster said EDB has been having conversations about using Postgres for OSS/BSS applications “for a while” now, but noted only over the last couple of years has the database advanced enough to support such a workload. That’s thanks in part to technologies like bi-directional replication, which helps increase availability from four 9s to the five 9s standard required by operators.
“Where traditionally Oracle used to rule the roost, now we have an open source database that comes in at about 20% of the cost. That immediately makes it attractive,” Linster said. “So much of their [the enterprise] budget is tied up in database licenses that then what we help them do is free up that money to drive innovation, to drive change.”
According to database tracker DB-Engines, Postgres is currently number four in the marketplace, behind Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server.
EDB already has more than 1,500 customers, with financial services, information technology and telecom among its top three commercial verticals. Linster pointed to the latter as “a really fast growing segment” for the company. Over the past several years, the telecom vertical alone has grown over 50% annually, a company representative told Fierce.
Linster said it continues to see “a whole lot” of interest from telecoms, and pointed to work it recently did with German telecoms provider Telegra to migrate its data centers to Postgres.
“The role of data in the enterprise is enormously important. But if you can’t take advantage of that at a little bit lower cost and greater agility, then it’s almost inaccessible,” Linster concluded.