'Portal is not just a billing solutions company'

Portal Software is a telecom billing software major with a low-profile presence in India. Bhasker Gotri, the company’s senior vice president for marketing and alliances, was in the country recently. RAHUL NEEL MANI caught up with him

* Looking at the rapid growth of mobile subscribers, what are Portal’s plans for India?

Portal has a very strong footprint in the wireless space, with 400 customers worldwide. Our software is used by nearly 15 operating companies on a global basis. For example, Vodafone has a service called Vodafone Live which has 500 content partners associated with it—and 20 million subscribers. Other Portal customers include Orange, Telecom Italia, and Telefonica. Europe and Japan are saturated markets for us. But the Asia Pacific is growing at an exponential rate both in terms of volumes and average revenue margins. Portal is already there in a couple of China Telecom properties. In India, we have a strong base and we want to build on that. We have a large centre in Bangalore which takes care of product development and customer solutions. Approximately five percent of our total revenue, which is $130 million, comes from India. The wireless market is growing at the maximum rate here.

But Portal is not just a billing solutions company. We now want to be called a revenue management company. With voice costs going down, India is the market with the greatest potential for us.

* What kind of investments does Portal make in its product development facilities in India?

Nearly 20 percent of our total expenditure every year is on R&D and product development. Over half of that is done in India. We don’t develop products in bits and pieces. Our entire product development is done through collaboration between engineers. We work on two areas: platforms (which may be generic) and business functionalities such as wireless, voice, VoIP and data content. Another large chunk (15 percent) of revenue comes from solutions. If you add up all of this, 25 percent of our investment is made in India. All the major solutions and products for Vodafone are developed in India, a vital site for us. It makes us feel like we are a local company. No other billing company has such a large presence in India, especially in terms of pure intellectual property creation and product development.

* Which is the most important area for Portal in India? Is it product development or finding new markets for your products?

We started off with customer solutions, then came product development. The reason we picked India out of 60 other locations is that we are into market potential. We know that if Portal wants to harness this potential it has to have a strong local presence and commitment. We had sales and services teams here way before we started product development. When ISPs started operating in India we were already here, so when the market is maturing now we naturally want to expand. Portal is the only billing software company which hires a third-party company called Prognostics to do customer surveys on a regular basis and publish the results. We are not a company that acquires a new customer, provides a solution, and runs away. We service the customer for a lifetime.

* When will we see an Indian carrier of the stature of Vodafone using Portal’s products and solutions?

Currently we don’t have a customer of that magnitude in India, but the way carriers such as Bharti, Reliance, Tata and BSNL are growing, we expect the same to happen in India very soon. We expect a Vodafone-like success story in India anytime. A key thing is offering new value-added services to existing customers so that the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) either remains the same or goes up both for the carrier and for us. We provide solutions that can be rolled out faster with minimal costs and without hassles.

* India is primarily a voice market. The GPRS networks failed to attract users. CDMA data usage is not picking up either. In this scenario, will service providers offer more data services?

There are three things involved in offering services other than voice. One is creating the right bundles and promotions. Content is a third-party matter so you have to synchronise that as well. Carriers have to make a value chain offer to customers. The third is the measurement of usage and doing the settlements. Portal products come with that. We have partner settlements, partner connectors and service bundling features in our products. Surely the data usage in India is very little now, but it is destined to grow along with the growing mobile worker population.

* What are your future plans?

We would like to offer solutions that are low in total cost of ownership, and platforms on which new services can be launched faster, and which provide revenue management solutions for a company’s end-to-end lifecycle. We are here to stay and have serious business plans. At present we have close to 300 people working at Portal, including R&D, and a year from now there would be a 20-40 percent growth depending on the prospects.As a billing solutions company, we are eyeing the top 4-5 service providers to create a niche for ourselves here, and we will make sure that it happens in a short time.