Portal billing acquisition fits with Oracle's Linux plans

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 18 April 2006 04:11

IT Industry - Deals

See also: Oracle to buy Portal Software

Oracle's decision to pay $US220 million for telco billing software developer, Portal Software fits neatly into its reported ambitions to gain, through acquisition, its own Linux distribution: release of a Linux version of the Portal billing system appears imminent.

Oracle announced just days ago that it was to acquire Cupertino-based Portal Software saying that Portal offered "the only billing and revenue management solution with a modern, object-oriented architecture built on Oracle that can bill and manage all communications services including wireline, wireless, broadband, cable, voice over IP, IPTV, music, and video."

Portal Software announced in August 2005 a commitment to support Linux, saying: "Portal 7 for Linux will be available in the first half of 2006 for media and communications providers seeking greater flexibility and additional cost savings from their billing and revenue management solutions." It has not made any follow-up announcement.

Portal 7 is described as: "a unified platform that enables service providers to manage revenue on any type of network: real-time IP and circuit-switched, fixed and mobile, voice and data."

Portal's decision to develop a Linux version of Portal 7 was supported by Oracle, with Ellen Minter, vice president of industry strategy and marketing at Oracle, quoted in Portal's press release saying: "Since introducing the first database to run on Linux in 1998, Oracle has been committed to furthering Linux adoption across the enterprise...Portal's strategic adoption of Linux demonstrates the company's continued commitment to deliver cost-effective choice to its customers as the adoption of Linux gathers speed in the communications and media industries.

Oracle has also just confirmed that it is considering production of its own Linux distribution, and is mulling over the prospects of acquiring a big Linux company in order to do it. And reports say that Oracle has investigated a possible acquisition of Novell, the producers of SUSE Enterprise Linux 10. There has also been speculation that Oracle is considering purchasing Red Hat.