In 2012, SAP Hybris Billing Solution (formerly known as BRIM) has been chosen to run better the vision of Mr Mukesh AMBANI, chairman & MD of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL): “Start a movement that will give Indians the power to make their dreams possible.” In other words, improve people’s life.

For all Hybris Billing teams, and for SAP Labs in Caen, that was the beginning of 5 years of sleepless nights, challenges, deep emotions, strong relationships… 5 amazing years!

India, RIL & Jio

Reliance Industries Limited is the largest private sector conglomerate in India, leaded by Mr. Mukesh Ambani. It is a Fortune 500 company ranked #215 in terms of revenue, with $44 billion (SAP #462). It is active on 7 different markets: Retail (largest Retailer in India), Petroleum, Natural gas, Petrochemicals, Textiles, Media, Telecommunications.

Reliance Jio, the telecommunication branch of the company, wants to rule a digital revolution based on high speed connectivity and innovative services on one of the biggest market of the world. They are the only operator to own a pan-Indian 4G license, and plan to reach 200 million customers in the coming years. To fulfil this purpose, RIL chose SAP Hybris Billing which includes Convergent Charging, developed by SAP Labs France in Caen. If the contracts were signed in 2010, it’s in 2012 that the real implementation began.

Co innovation, to go beyond obstacles

And the obstacles are enormous ! RIL wishes seemed out of reach : the 200 million target means for SAP Convergent Charging the highest number of customers ever supported. Main obstacle was to surpass our scalability capabilities to reach the performance level expected (more than 10 times what we already achieved with other customers), and to remain stable at the same time. To ensure a nation-wide coverage, Jio wanted to deploy 8 differents landscapes, with Geo-redudancy.

To complete the requirements, that’s not only RIL and SAP LABs Caen but also many experts from SAP consulting, AGS, and IMS who dedicated themselves to the project. We even had the support from Mr Bill McDERMOTT and Mr Tim BOLTE when they visited India. As a result, Frenches, Indians, Germans, Americans, all overcome their cultural differences to deeply understand each over and cooperate. Another tremendous “One SAP” success!

During those 5 years, it was:

• – 3 development teams in Caen devoted to RIL’s project
• – 30 developed features asked by RIL
• – 1 situation room in Germany with a constant presence of developers from Caen for almost 6 months
• – Daily calls with India… every day during 2 years!
• – 10 people from SAP Labs France who made several trips to India… That’s 540 hours in a plane and 420,000km during 3 years

Achievements

The go-live was launched on September 2016, and they already crossed 72.4M customers by December 31^st. Today Reliance has now one of the biggest landscape seen at SAP (more than 5.900 cores, 16Tb of memory, 320 Tb of SSD disks), and thanks to the continuous collaboration of all SAP teams, SAP Convergent Charging landscape is running seamlessly.

This international collaboration was a success and it will still continue for a long time! RIL just signed a new contract with us, for 5 more years and €6 Million… and for us, that’s new opportunities to improve our solution and ourselves!