Portal Concludes a Year of Aggressive Performance Improvements and Benchmark Testing
Wednesday November 13, 4:20 pm ET
The industry's first real-world billing benchmarks demonstrate Portal's ability to exceed Tier-1 operator performance requirements
CUPERTINO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 13, 2002-- Portal Software, Inc. (Nasdaq:PRSF - News), a leading provider of billing and customer management software, today announced that it has completed an extensive series of performance benchmarks in conjunction with several leading hardware and software partners and key customers. The benchmarks, which followed the introduction of new versions of the Infranet product, were conducted over the past four months. The actual data, price plans, business models, and service requirements used for the benchmarks were created based on input taken directly from Portal's Tier-1 customers.
"Many benchmark and performance tests which are run today are not based on real-world scenarios," said John Little, founder and chief executive officer of Portal Software. "We felt it was critical to work with several customers to define real scenarios that simulate their business environment. These benchmarks tested end-to-end processing of billing data with an emphasis on complex, real-world billing and rating scenarios. I do not think any other vendors in the enterprise billing market are aggressively stress testing their software in this way."
The benchmark tests were conducted on standard configurations with end-to-end rating and database recording designed to match the real-life configurations of Tier-1 communication service providers. To further validate the integrity of the performance results, Portal customers actively monitored the benchmarking process.
"By using real-world customer criteria for benchmarks, Portal has proven its commitment to providing a billing solution that supports the critical business requirements of Tier-1 communications service providers," said Paul Hughes, director of Billing and Payment Application Strategies, Yankee Group. "With its recent performance enhancements, Portal's convergent billing platform can now be successfully positioned as a replacement for an expensive legacy voice billing system."
The benchmark tests were based on a typical large carrier requiring a billing system that supports 15-25 million subscribers, processing over 200 million call detail records (CDRs) per day or 8 billion CDRs per month. Portal consistently achieved near real-time rating speeds of 8,800 to over 12,000 CDRs per second, which includes the time required to record the event into the database, and update the associated account balances. Billing for GSM-related services achieved rates up to 775 bills per second. Based on requirements from over 20 of its largest customers, these results far exceed the real-world requirements of the industry's largest carriers.
"In an extremely competitive market for convergent services, providers must be equipped to support ever-increasing complexity while keeping operational costs under control," said Dave Labuda, chief technology officer of Portal Software. "Working closely with the industry's leading hardware and software partners, we've proven that our cost-effective open architecture can rapidly adapt to support even the most complex environments without the least compromise in performance."
About Portal Software, Inc.
Portal Software develops product-based customer management and billing solutions for communications and content service providers. Portal's convergent platform enables service providers to deliver voice, data, video, and content services with multiple networks, payment models, pricing plans, and value chains. Portal's unique approach is designed to provide its customers superior return on innovation with maximum value and lower total cost of ownership. Customers include Vodafone, AOL Time Warner, Deutsche Telekom, TELUS, NTT, China Telecom, Reuters, Telstra, China Mobile, Telenor Mobil, Vivendi, and France Telecom.
Infranet and the Portal logo are U.S. registered trademarks, and Portal is a trademark 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. |
