Portal Soft plans Delhi, Mumbai centres

Portal Software Inc, a provider of billing and management solutions, has decided to extend its operations to Delhi and Mumbai by the end of this year.

The company has a development centre in Bangalore with 350 professionals. Portal is in talks with Bharti, Reliance, Idea and several other companies to provide billing and subscriber management solutions.

Howard Bain, chief financial officer, Portal Software, said: "With the expansion of cellular and broadband services in India, the billing market is growing. The unified license regime will also add to the market dynamics as operators will have to employ a convergent billing solution which can handle voice rating, data and content services rating and interconnect settlement for both voice and data content."

Portal's solution would enable service providers to charge their customers under a simple single window clearing system, he said.

According to a study by Frost and Sulivan, the total Indian market size for billing in 2003 was $33.1 million. The present billing market is set to go under a change due to increase in the number of prepaid customers.

The data traffic is also increasing, making it a lucrative business for the service providers. Portal's convergent billing solutions will handle all these, David J Yuen, vice-president, Portal Software Asia-Pacific, said.

Portal has operations in 14 countries in Asia, Europe and the United States. It is listed in Nasdaq.