Aria Systems Announces Aria for Communications(TM)

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Jul 19, 2016) -  Aria Systems, which provides an agility platform for subscription and usage-based businesses, today announced Aria for Communications™, a cloud-based offering for mobile, multiple system operators (MSOs), and over-the-top (OTT) media providers that removes billing bottlenecks and allows businesses to rapidly create, introduce, and test digital services tailored to their target markets. Aria for Communications helps these Communications Service Providers (CSPs) monetize new businesses by leveraging the cloud to increase their go-to-market speed and agility without having to compromise on enterprise-grade scalability, performance, and security. Innovative enterprises like Verizon, Roku, TDC, and Italiaonline already depend on Aria for increased agility that accelerates their time to revenue, maximizes customer lifetime value, and ultimately fuels growth. To learn more about Aria for Communications download the whitepaper and attend the upcoming webinar.

Faced with declining profitability in traditional core businesses, decreased product lifecycles, and increased competition from new disruptors in streaming media, CSPs need to complement their expensive, slow, insular BSS/OSS systems to deliver more agile services and simpler, better end-customer experiences.

Aria for Communications was created in response to market demand for an offering that enables a bi-modal architecture strategy in which Aria governs the monetization of newer businesses, and easily integrates with existing legacy BSS systems to manage the core business. By augmenting incumbent systems Aria accelerates the speed to market and revenue streams of new product offerings, bundles, and promotions while complying with all the existing downstream processes and reporting.

"Aria's approach gives CSPs the agility to bring a wider variety of products to market more quickly, building customer loyalty and growing revenue; no costly, time-consuming replacement or upgrades of lethargic but engrained legacy systems are required," said Robert Strickland, Former CIO of T-Mobile, Former CTO of Cricket Wireless and Founder, Digital Nexus. "With Aria for Communications, I can see how CSPs can iterate faster, leveraging their agile processes, and improve upon product offerings that increase customer engagement, satisfaction and revenue growth."

According to Gartner Research, CSP CIOs need to "... re-engineer the core IT, and create a new digital platform, adopting and instilling new methodologies to enable BUs (business units) to respond rapidly to capture market opportunities and deal with the high levels of uncertainty that are inherent in emerging digital ecosystems."¹

With Aria, legacy BSS/OSS systems become more agile and responsive to:

• Quickly evolve service offerings, pricing, packaging, and promotions without disrupting or overhauling their existing infrastructure
• Orchestrate the dissemination of customer data to the correct systems as needed, and rapidly iterate product catalog of services and pricing across market segments, geographies, and currencies
• Calculate and present accurate invoices and statements for more intuitive end-customer usability; feed invoices, line items, usage and transaction data into existing systems of record. Work hand-in-hand with existing systems (including CRM, existing billing platforms and financial systems) to calculate recurring revenue, churn, and forward-looking metrics associated with any type of consumption model
• Easily integrate via standard connectors and APIs to existing BSS and OSS components including web portals, mediation systems, CRM systems, e-commerce platforms, business intelligence solutions, ERP/GL systems, and more

Aria, recently heralded by CIO Review as one of twenty most promising telecom vendors, is the only cloud-based monetization provider that has the building blocks required to successfully manage the monetization process for mobile operators and MSOs:

• Process Management - Automate core billing and revenue management capabilities:
  • Product Management - Dynamic and extensible hierarchical product catalog for sophisticated subscription and usage-based pricing, bundling, promotions and discount management without SKU proliferation
  • Agile Billing Management - Timely, accurate billing with human intervention only on an exception basis
  • Customer Management - Extensible hierarchical account to manage multiple payment options per account and per plan. Monitor and influence customer behavior via actionable customer insights
  • Financial Management - Billing and revenue recognition with the ERP/Financial Management system of record
• Event Management - Tailor business processes and event management across the ecosystem via Aria's proprietary Active Orchestration™ APIs and workflow
• Line of Business Enablement - Empower business users with direct control -- through configuration, not code -- to better monetize their offerings
• Enterprise Grade Scalability & Security - Trust your monetization operations and connectivity to the leader in enterprise monetization
• Rapid Time to Value - Transform digital business and go-to-market faster with the proven experience and expertise of the market leader
• Out-of-the-Box Integration - Go live quickly with Aria's broad library of APIs for B2B connectivity as well as FTP data sharing

Aria has been enlisted as part of the Salesforce for Communications ecosystem, as the billing solution provider. Aria is partnering with Salesforce to help CSPs leverage Salesforce's CRM to improve their customer experience and accelerate revenue growth. The Salesforce Communications Ecosystem brings together best-of-breed technologies, such as Aria's cloud-based monetization platform, in an integrated solution to help accelerate innovation and time-to-revenue.

"We are honored to be singled out by CIO Review as a top telecom monetization platform provider, enabling telecoms to quickly capitalize on market opportunities, while maintaining enterprise-grade performance, scalability, and security," said Tom Dibble, President & CEO, Aria Systems. "Aria looks forward to partnering with CSPs by providing them speed and agility required in today's markets, without having to compromise on their industrial-strength foundation."

¹ Gartner, How CSP CIOs Can Manage the Demands of Business Unit IT, Mentor Cana, Neil Osmond, Monica Zlotogorski, 19 May 2016

About Aria Systems
Aria Systems' cloud-based monetization platform is the consensus analyst choice, top ranked by leading research firms. Innovative enterprises like Adobe, Philips and Zipcar depend on Aria to accelerate time to market and increase flexibility, enabling them to maximize customer value and grow recurring revenue through subscription and usage-based offerings. For more information, visit www.ariasystems.com.

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