This billing solution is evolving, after the acquisition of Portal by Oracle, into a carrier class product serving ISPs with millions of customers and diverse product portfolios.

by Jeff Goldman [May 24, 2006]

Portal Software was founded in 1985 as the Portal Information Network, an early ISP. In the early '90s, founder John Little sold the ISP and refocused the company on software development. "What he saw in the ISP business was a need for an extremely flexible piece of software that could handle a very rapidly evolving market," says Jennifer Kyriakakis, Portal's Director of Product Marketing.

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The first commercial release of the product was in the mid-'90s, and the solution grew steadily over the following decade. In April of 2006, Oracle announced its intent to purchase Portal for approximately $220 million. Now, Kyriakakis says, while the basic offering remains the same, the plan over time is to gradually increase the level of integration between the two companies' solutions.

The current release of the software, Portal 7, supports a wide range of offerings. "It's an end-to-end revenue management application that can manage customers, revenues and services for all types of communications services," Kyriakakis says. "All IP-based services, of course, but also wireless and wireline services, traditional voice services, satellite services, and other types of media services."

Since its initial creation, Kyriakakis says, the product has grown in functionality to handle everything from payments to partner management—and it's also grown in performance and scalability. Portal has always supported real-time charging, but it now does so with a very low latency architecture, she says, "to support a lot of the robust prepaid models we're seeing out there in the market today."

Enabling new ISP offerings
For ISPs, Portal's content management functionality is a major asset. "A lot of ISPs are launching a lot more content-related offerings, video-related offerings, IPTV offerings—so the ability to integrate with content partners to capture content transactions and manage those partners within the billing system is key," Kyriakakis says.

The increasing number of participants in the content value chain, Kyriakakis says, makes charging for content (and sharing the revenue correctly) increasingly difficult. "It's not just about the person who creates the content: there's the content creator, there's the content aggregator, there's potentially a content distributor—all of whom participate in some way, shape or form in the sale of the content," she says.

And that also creates a challenge in terms of customer management. "We no longer see a one-to-one relationship between the customer and the payment method that they choose," Kyriakakis says. "We're seeing people who want to pay the traditional broadband monthly fees, but they also want to have prepaid VoIP service, and they want to have their kids pre-paying for video downloads—to be able to mix those types of payment methods across one account."

For the same reasons, Kyriakakis says, Portal's analysis functionality is also key. "We have the ability to understand which services customers are actually using, and which services are most profitable to the service provider," she says. "That's going to become more important as we see content proliferate, so ISPs will be able to know which content services and which types of value-added applications subscribers are really willing to pay for—and what they're willing to pay."

Targeting larger providers
Portal 7's basic structure is modular, starting with a base platform and then adding any of a range of different modules to target particular platforms and markets. The solution works with HP, Sun, and Microsoft servers, and with Oracle and SQL Server databases.

This isn't a solution for small ISPs. Kyriakakis says the company's focus is on Tier 1 and Tier 2 providers. Sample customers include Telecom Italia, with approximately 14 million subscribers, and FT Wanadoo, with 12 million. "We've been able to scale as these large ISPs grow," she says.

That scalability, Kyriakakis says, applies to adding new technology as well as adding new subscribers. "A lot of these ISP customers have been rolling out IPTV, enterprise voice over IP, and some of the collaboration type of applications that go on top of that—and they've been able to continue using the Portal system that was put in in 1999 or 2000 to support the business models around those services," she says.

Looking ahead, Kyriakakis says, Portal will continue to change along with the industry. "We're as excited as the rest of the industry is to see how ISPs are going to compete," she says. "And we're going to keep on evolving our product in a standards-based way that's going to be able to scale with a lot of these ISPs as broadband just becomes more and more prolific."

Acquired applications
Derek Peterson is Vice President of Billable Service Operations at United Online, the company created from the merger of NetZero and Juno back in 2001. Juno has been using Portal since 1998, and NetZero started using the solution after the formation of United Online.

Juno's selection of Portal, Peterson says, was the result of extensive research. "They did pretty intense analysis of the billing systems that were available for the ISP business—and Portal was the leader in providing real time solutions for ISPs," he says. "Most of the other billing systems were more telco-based instead of service-based."

Recently, United Online has been describing itself as an internet company rather than an ISP, touting a list of online services beyond internet access. Peterson says Portal has helped United Online manage its wide range of acquisitions and new offerings, including MyPoints, Classmates, MySite.com, PhotoSite, FreeServers, e-mailMyName, BizHosting, and GlobalServers. "We've been able to use the system fairly easily to bring these other groups in," he says.

While Peterson says he hasn't seen any significant changes yet as a result of the Oracle acquisition, he says United Online is thrilled with the news. "We're a big Oracle shop, so we're excited about what that means in terms of even tighter integration with our Oracle financials," he says.

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