Portal Software accelerates time to market with new solutions set

Portal Press Release, August, 14, 2003

CUPERTINO, CA — Portal Software, Inc. today announced the availability of new solution sets for the company’s award-winning convergent billing platform. Designed to further accelerate time to market for new services, the new solution sets include a next-generation GSM solution, a new Pricing Center, and the joint Portal and Siebel TelcoOne™ solution. These solution sets demonstrate the momentum that Portal continues to gain by providing the most advanced, easy-to-use, product-based billing solution to the market.

“Portal has a proven track record of delivering innovative solutions designed to help our customers meet their business objectives,” said Shay Mowlem, vice president of product marketing at Portal Software. “Portal is continually extending the capabilities of its product-based solution to provide real customer advantage by developing new solutions that enhance operational efficiencies and working with our partners to offer integrated solutions that reduce development time and costs.”

GSM Manager 2.0 Accelerates Time to Revenue

GSM Manager enables service providers to bring unique GSM services to market in days or weeks, accelerating time to revenue and avoiding traditional multi-month development. Portal’s GSM Manager provides full support for traditional GSM services with an object oriented software platform, which increases operational efficiencies by enabling service providers to rapidly leverage existing user interfaces, service logic, and business logic to rapidly define new services. Enhancements to customer management, service management, service provisioning, and usage processing deliver the flexibility needed to directly reduce the time and effort required to deploy GSM services. With GSM Manager, service providers can quickly adapt to changing business models and competitive pressures.

In this solution set, Portal also supports the GSM roaming standard TAP version 3.10 and the CDMA roaming standard CIBER. By leveraging a product-based solution for roaming, Portal’s customers are able to support new roaming standards without the time delays and high cost of customization.

Pricing Center Simplifies Convergent Pricing

Portal’s new Pricing Center is a fully convergent application with unparalleled flexibility that enables service providers to create innovative service offerings and react quickly to market and competitive pricing pressures. With enhanced usability and unified operational tools designed to expedite new convergent offerings, service providers are fully equipped to accelerate time-to-market by rapidly launching, evaluating, and modifying new service offerings without increasing their cost structure or overburdening IT resources.

As the first billing vendor to provide a GUI pricing tool, Portal has continued to lead the industry in improving pricing features, resulting in the latest next-generation convergent GUI tool. The new Pricing Center GUI defines innovative convergent pricing and billing offerings that span voice, data, and content services while addressing multi-national business needs with support for multiple languages, currencies, taxation rules, and business processes. The new tool also enables service providers to customize pricing to individual subscribers, affinity groups, family members, or corporations using any payment type, including prepaid and postpaid.

The Pricing Center application suite is based on the next-generation Portal application technology and standards and offers significant architectural improvements that will reduce the cost of data administration for service providers. The user-friendly GUI effectively p resents all configuration modules and utilities required for managing pricing data from test to production environments in an integrated suite.

TelcoOne Eliminates Integration Costs

The TelcoOne solution integrates Portal’s convergent billing platform with Siebel Communications to provide an end-to-end customer relationship management (CRM) and billing solution designed to dramatically reduce integration costs. TelcoOne builds upon the extensive functionality contained within each of these best-of-breed applications and enables service providers to manage, synchronize, and coordinate sales, marketing, and customer service across all communication channels and points of customer contact.

TelcoOne addresses the most critical integration challenges that service providers face when deploying CRM and billing within a complex OSS/BSS environment. TelcoOne delivers functionality that is critical to growing market share in today’s competitive market, such as synchronizing product and pricing catalogs from each application in real-time, which preserves data integrity and enables service providers to accelerate the process of launching new products and promotions. Based upon industry standards and web services, TelcoOne leverages Siebel Business Integration Applications and Universal Application Network (UAN).

“TelcoOne represents a new breed of total solution designed to reduce IT environment complexity and overhead while uniting previously disparate enterprise applications for enhanced customer satisfaction,” said Kevin Nix, group vice president industry applications, Siebel Systems. “Working together, Siebel and Portal are changing the way carriers and service providers can leverage technology to reduce operational costs and customer churn.”

The new solution sets are available immediately to Portal customers who are using the current version of the product. TelcoOne is supported on Portal Infranet 6.5, Siebel Communications 7.5, and Siebel UAN 2.0. #