Portal's Infranet product is licensed by over three quarters of the world's 25 largest communications companies. Portal's more than 420 enterprise-level customers include such providers as AOL, Prodigy, Juno, and the German ISP T-Online.

by Jeff Goldman [August 13, 2001]

Note: Acquired by Oracle.

Portal Software, based in Cupertino, California, started out, way back in early Internet days (1985), as an ISP called the Portal Information Network. In the mid-90s, John Little, Portal's founder and CEO, began to shift the company's focus towards the development of billing solutions. In 1996, Portal sold its ISP business to Sprint and launched its customer management and billing platform offering.

Paul Hoff, Senior Manager at Portal Software, points to the company's history as a key differentiator between Portal and many other billing companies. "Our competition consists typically of companies that have evolved from the world of telephony billing," he said. "We were very lucky that we went into this business from scratch, asking the question, 'What's the best stuff on the market; how would you design this from scratch?'"

As a result, Hoff contends, Portal's solutions provide customers with unique flexibility in handling the kinds of billing issues that ISPs face. "Rather than tying our billing system to a specific type of service, we put into the base billing engine everything you need to do to bill a customer for any kind of service an ISP might want to offer," he said.

Portal Software (888) 343-4400 productinfo@portal.com

Any organization selling services needs to register customers, send messages to turn on or configure a service, prorate fees for signups or cancellations, and track use of resources-whatever those resources might be. Hoff says one gaming service supported by Portal charges its users by for each bullet fired; the possibilities are unlimited.

Power billing
Portal's Infranet billing solution is an open-architecture platform that lets a company manage every aspect of customer management and billing. The server platforms Infranet currently supports are HP-UX, Windows NT or 2000, and Sun Solaris; IBM AIX support is planned for the near future. The system also requires a relational database, either Oracle or SQL Server.

Available within the Infranet product line are a number of pre-built modules (left) targeted at specific industry segments: The ISP solution includes the Terminal Server Manager, which oversees the customer logon process. Special modules are also available for the wireless, cable, and satellite industries, among others.

According to Hoff, the fact that Infranet is a real-time—not batch-based—solution is a key to its power. Real-time billing is clearly strategic for ISPs that offer a prepaid option, which counts down remaining minutes, but beyond that, it expands the options an ISP can consider when marketing its services. "It allows you to do a lot of the very marketing-focused plans that you wouldn't be able to do with a batch-based system," Hoff said.

Hoff stresses the point that Infranet frees its users to explore billing models they might not otherwise have considered—and lets them pin down the details they might otherwise miss. "It could be that if you exceed a certain number of bytes transferred, we're going to charge you for it," he said. "A lot of service providers have that provision in their contract, but they tend not to charge for small overages, because they're hard to track. They're probably missing out on some money that they could charge if it was all integrated."

A plan for every pocket
The offering of value added services is another important factor in differentiating from other ISPs. Infranet's flexibility allows an ISP to offer a wide range of options to its users: a basic plan for one rate, a stock trader's plan for another rate, a gaming plan for another, and so on. "It helps ISPs, who have a pretty generic, un-differentiatable product, both to differentiate and to move their customers up, to get more value out of each customer," Hoff said.

According to Hoff, this is ultimately why AOL signed on for Infranet; so they could break away from charging the same $23.90 a month for every user. "There's a whole lot of opportunity that they're missing," Hoff said. "Offering different services, different price plans, lower, higher, et cetera; they saw the value in that."

Another Infranet feature allows an ISP to manage multiple branded affinity offerings (right). The ISP can keep all its customers on a single system, regardless of what brands of service they're signed up for. Whenever they receive an invoice, sign in to the service, or log in and check their account, customers see only the brand for which they're registered. It's a logical extension of value added services, and it allows ISPs to maintain a wide variety of service options on the same system.

Scalability has its price
Still, Infranet definitely isn't for everyone. Hoff says Portal's target market is ISPs with 100,000 users or more—and the software really doesn't make much sense for smaller companies: License fees for Infranet start at $100,000 and go up from there, depending on the number of users supported. The annual maintenance fee, which includes upgrades as well as both e-mail and telephone support, is between 10 and 20 percent of the license fee.

For the price, an ISP gets a degree of scalability that's rare in the industry—and Hoff claims that ultimately puts Infranet in a class by itself.

Deutsche Telecom's T-Online service, one of Portal's customers, has over 8 million customers, and it expects to grow to more than 10 million by the end of the year. "None of the ISP-specific billing companies could even get close to that," Hoff said.

The product's prodigious scalability has a tradeoff, however: Installation is far from easy. The software has to be integrated and customized according to each ISP's particular needs (see, for example, the admin screenshot below). Portal's own professional services team will install the software for a fee, or an ISP can choose to work with any leading systems integrator to run the installation process.

Hoff says implementation can take anywhere from a month to a year, depending on the degree of customization and the amount of legacy data to be integrated.

Back on the up side, with Portal's extensive experience in the ISP market, it's hard to stump them. "We support a lot of the common ways that people will get and retrieve information," Hoff said. "A lot of the things that people want to interface, like a customer care system from Siebel for example, we've probably already done it somewhere before."

How big is big? VirgilioTin is the Internet services division of Telecom Italia, providing dialup, DSL, and webhosting to over 5 million customers. Facing growing competition in the European market, VirgilioTin decided to swell its offering with a number of value added services.

In order to do so, the ISP implemented Portal's Infranet solution early this year. "Our legacy system could not provide the business infrastructure to deploy new services and pricing plans efficiently," said Massimo D'Ulisse, Project Manager at VirgilioTin. "Infranet's solution lets us provide our customers with the multiple services they require today and in the future."

D'Ulisse says that Infranet's open architecture facilitated the integration, allowing the system to work in parallel with VirgilioTin's legacy system while data was shifted to the new platform. But Infranet's account management capabilities were the key selling point.

According to Antonio Ciccarelli, Systems Director at VirgilioTin, the software helps the company to separate its residential and business divisions, allowing for a wider variety of services within each division. "Infranet's multichannel business management capabilities let us automate our relationships with our suppliers and channel partners to provide the best possible service," Ciccarelli said.

D'Ulisse also noted Infranet's scalability as an important factor: VirgilioTin is currently signing up about 10,000 new accounts every day, and expects to reach 8 million subscribers by 2002. "Infranet allows us to rapidly introduce new services and pricing models to maximize the revenue potential of each subscriber," he said.

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