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Service providers today are working to offer customers new services and features such as multimedia messaging, Internet Protocol-based telephony, and new devices that offer greater interaction with the Internet, but they are often hindered by the functionality of the network elements that make up their existing operation and business support systems (OSS/BSS). With a shared vision of how Web services will transform applications in the industry, Microsoft and Portal have partnered to offer BillingAgility™, a solution that will allow service providers to bill for new services while avoiding the recurring costs of upgrading or developing new code to enhance legacy functionality.

Utilizing Web services, BillingAgility is a scalable, high-performance solution designed to meet the billing and subscriber management needs of service providers today, as well as support the new services of the future. The solution combines Portal’s Infranet® software with Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003, SQL Server™ 2000 and BizTalk® Server to deliver to customers unmatched flexibility, superior performance and reduced total cost of ownership.

• Unmatched flexibility. BillingAgility has the flexibility customers need to easily make changes to complex billing systems and interface with third-party business applications. The architecture of BillingAgility, utilizing Web service standards such as XML and SOAP, enables faster and easier integration with other applications and legacy systems, and also facilitates easier B2B integrations enabling service providers to rapidly build content partner communities. For example, the seamless connection of data from a CRM or general ledger system to BillingAgility will require less than 50 percent of the previous programming effort.

• Superior performance. BillingAgility is a billing and subscriber management solution built on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (64-bit) with the SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition (64-bit). Service providers utilizing a 64-bit architecture and BillingAgility will be able to support more than 25 million subscribers and achieve faster rating and billing runs. This dramatically reduces the amount of hardware necessary to run and manage mission-critical applications and meets the processing needs of the world’s largest tier-1 carriers.

• Reduced total cost of ownership. Portal’s product-based solution model combined with Microsoft technology-based computing platforms sets a new standard for total cost of ownership benefits. BillingAgility provides an advantage to telecommunications service providers in reducing implementation time, and ongoing infrastructure costs can be significantly reduced compared with alternative approaches using custom-developed solutions.


“We are excited to partner with Portal — one of the most advanced billing companies innovating on Microsoft technology and an industry leader with a wealth of experience,” said Goetz Kauschka, general manager of Network Service Providers at Microsoft. “We look forward to our continued relationship to deliver service providers a rock-solid infrastructure to support their future success.”

“Microsoft is widely recognized as delivering some of the most advanced Web services technologies,” said Bhaskar Gorti, senior vice president of marketing and alliances for Portal. “Partnering with Microsoft, Portal is driving the adoption of Web services in the billing industry and setting new standards for business agility and reduced cost of operations to service providers.”

Portal and Microsoft will continue to work together at a strategic level to align longer-term product road maps and customer goals.