Wednesday April 4, 8:05 am Eastern Time
Press Release
Toshiba Standardizes B2B Marketplace Billing Infrastructure on Portal Software's Infranet
Infranet Streamlines Toshiba's Supply Chain Billing Activities
CUPERTINO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 4, 2001--Portal Software, Inc. (Nasdaq:PRSF - news), a leading provider of business infrastructure software for next-generation communications services, has won a contract from Toshiba Information and Industrial Systems and Service Company to provide Infranet®, Portal's industry-leading customer management and billing platform. Toshiba is deploying Infranet as the underlying billing infrastructure for its B2B Marketplace, e-ing Biz.com (http://www.e-ingbiz.com), an Internet-based system that the company developed to streamline its own procurement supply chain and will also offer to other companies on an ASP basis.
e-ing Biz.com combines a number of processes, procedures and products that are part of the procurement process. These include comprehensive procurement operations for inter-corporate transactions, document management, workflow control and electronic catalogues all in a single service package.
Toshiba chose Infranet because of its reputation as one of the industry's de facto standard billing systems, citing flexibility and
scalability as two of its key features. The company will use Infranet
to standardize and centralize a number of procurement billing systems, which have been developed by its subsidiaries, thereby reducing development and maintenance costs. In addition, Toshiba acts as an application service provider, offering e-ing Biz.com on a business footing to other organizations that wish to make use of the application.
``Although we already had a billing system in house, once we evaluated Infranet we realized it would give us much more flexibility than our existing system,'' said Takayuki Matsudaira, e-net operations division chief engineer at Toshiba. ``This was important since we knew we would be introducing improvements and upgrades to the system. The fact that it can handle complex billing was yet another point that appealed to us. These features greatly reduce both start-up and future development costs. We introduced e-ing Biz.com in the last fiscal year and have already reduced the cost of procuring parts. We now plan to introduce the system to all Toshiba companies, affiliates and customers.''
As part of the evaluation process, Toshiba dealer Itochu Techno-Science Corporation (CTC) developed an Infranet-based prototype billing system and installed it. This step enabled the actual project to be completed in an impressively short timeframe of less than two months.
``The speed at which the project could be implemented was an important consideration in the final decision-making process,'' said Matsudaira. ``In the end, Toshiba conducted the evaluation, and CTC handled education and consultancy. The ease of installation was so remarkable that the introduction of the simple-to-construct Infranet solution is being studied at a number of other companies in the Toshiba group.''
Robert Lau, vice president of Portal Software (Asia Pacific) Limited said, ``Infranet is uniquely capable of supporting very complex service offerings and ever-changing business models. This is why Portal has been selected by over 20 leading B2B Marketplaces and ASPs, such as i2, BuildNet, Taiwan's eASPNet and Australia's Peakhour. We are very pleased to be able to provide our adaptable business infrastructure platform to help Toshiba achieve the efficiency and flexibility it needs to stay competitive in this fast-moving environment.''
About Portal Software, Inc.
Portal Software provides software to manage next-generation communications and e-services. The Infranet software platform enables service providers to rapidly deploy new services, define optimal business models and price plans, and bill their users. Portal's software is licensed by more than three-quarters of the world's 25 largest communications services companies to support wireless, broadband Internet, next-generation voice, and other e-service offerings. Customers include AOL Time Warner, Reuters, Qwest Communications, Sprint, NTT, Deutsche Telekom, Telenor Mobil AS, China Telecom, and France Telecom and Akamai Technologies, Inc. Portal Software employs over 1,500 people at more than 40 offices worldwide. For more information, visit www.portal.com
Copyright (c) 2001 Portal Software, Inc. All rights reserved. Infranet is a U.S. registered trademark, and Portal and the Portal logo are trademarks of Portal Software, Inc. All statements made in this press release are made only as of the date set forth at the beginning of this release. Portal undertakes no obligation to update the information in the event facts or circumstances subsequently change.
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Contact:
Portal Software, Inc.
Christina Dort, 408/572-2425
cdort@portal.comhttp://biz.yahoo.com/bw/010404/2076.html |
