Aria Systems Launches Aria Crescendo

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Sep 8, 2016) - Aria Systems, the leader in helping enterprises grow subscription and usage-based revenue, today announced the general availability of Aria Crescendo, the platform that defines the new standard for cloud-based monetization for multi-dimensional customer choice. Aria Crescendo enables businesses to better serve and retain today's ever-demanding customers, including both individual consumers and business entities, who require offerings that meet their preferences. With Aria Omni-node™ technology, a hierarchical, n-tier product catalog and account management architecture, enterprises can create offerings and elegant account structures in limitless variations. Customers are afforded greater choice to match their preferences surrounding their purchasing and consumption experience; paying how and when they want -- versus conforming to constraints and frustrations imposed by the enterprises' outdated billing technologies. Innovative enterprises like Sungard Availability Services (Sungard AS) already depend on Aria Crescendo for increased agility, greater billing transparency and flexibility that maximizes customer lifetime value, and ultimately fuels growth. Learn more about Aria Crescendo.

While other platforms are focused on how products are sold, Aria Crescendo is designed for how customers buy, which is increasingly recurring and usage-based. The customer now calls the shots and enterprises serving them must adapt accordingly. Yet, the plethora of permutations required for success have hamstrung existing billing systems, spawning multiple inefficient and manual processes or forcing companies to abandon initiatives that capitalize on these market trends.

Aria Crescendo is the first monetization platform to provide multi-dimensional customer choice by enabling highly tailored product offerings that support this new business reality. User friendly configurations define attributes including: pricing, promotions, consumption options, payment methods, dunning processes, product and account hierarchies, and business terms such as payers, channels, business units, geographies, entities, and the like.

This is also the first platform with the ability to aggregate bills for multiple locations and to make services portable for customers as they change location, device or use case. Customers now also have the ability to move digital add-on services for "child" entities from simple "parent-pay" to "self-pay" or to split components of service bundles among payers and users.

Importantly, Aria provides all of this capability without imposing the risk associated with replacing legacy systems. With state-of-the-art integration, businesses can benefit from Aria's agile augmentation while allowing incumbent systems to remain in place, as enterprises choose.

"As Sungard AS' monetization partner, Aria provides us with the speed and agility required for our product releases that we can't provide on our legacy billing platforms," said Josh Crowe, CTO, Sungard AS. "With the new Aria Crescendo platform, we are increasing our ability to craft and launch new services that meet the consumption and billing preferences of our customers."

Aria Crescendo benefits both customers and the businesses that serve them:

• Customer-first - Facilitates multi-dimensional choice so customers can buy the products they want, how they want. Customers can define and buy the exact set of product attributes, pricing, promotions, consumption options, payment methods and terms to meet their preferences. Aria Crescendo also delivers transparent and accurate billing and invoicing. 
  
  
• Line of business-enabled - Removes the billing bottleneck that has shackled marketing from delivering and iterating on offerings, bundles, and promotions. Built so business owners can deliver more of the offerings and services that their buyers want. Supports vendors' ability to precisely tailor product offerings and create sophisticated account hierarchies to meet customers' unique requirements. They can tie them to their hierarchy of accounts with combinations of payers, channels, business units, geographies, entities, and schedules. Allows fast delivery, testing, and iteration of the widest variety of product offerings. Minimizes unnecessary steps, clicks, and overall complexity of sophisticated monetization scenarios and products. Eliminates SKU proliferation and reduces tiresome scrolling to save manpower and computing power while creating a better user experience.
  
  
• Extensible - Enables boundless permutations of products, bundles, and promotions with one-to-many accounts to entities, devices, and locations hierarchies via Omni-node™ n-tier product catalog and hierarchical account management technologies. Empowers flexible and efficient handling of any product, offering, or service that enterprises might dream up now or down the road. Designed to meet the explosion of IoT data monetization, aka Monetization of Things™ (MoT).
  
  
• Enterprise-ready - Employs carrier-grade, industrial-strength hardware and software technologies to meet and exceed the most stringent availability, reliability, security and privacy standards.  

"Leading organizations today are able to create products, services, and bundles quickly and at scale," said Andrew Dailey, Managing Director of MGI Research. "Consumers and enterprises alike want to buy products and services that are tailored to their unique needs -- and the ability to quickly change what they consume and how they pay. Essential to an Agile Monetization Platform is the ability to offer a spectrum of pricing modalities and highly flexible account hierarchies."

For instance, in the B2C world, if Jane E. Customer wants to purchase an internet plan and a gaming plan under one account and then have the internet plan billed to her business MasterCard and the gaming plan billed to her personal VISA card, then she can. The seller has a single record that tracks all the activity and history but can specify different processes and treatment to each individual product. If the VISA card expires and a payment is rejected, a company-specified dunning process can address the offering on the expired card without affecting the other offering. By contrast, the previous standard necessitated two accounts for each purchase, which couldn't be aggregated. It required manual lookups for a complete view of the account, which was both time consuming and error prone.

In the B2B world, an n-tiered account structure means bills can be split in multiple ways to better suit customer needs. A bill can be parsed to any entity and be delivered to company specifications. Products can also be rolled up for charging all along the hierarchy. 

Aria supports sophisticated parent-child hierarchies for complex corporate entities and multinationals. Each child account can have its own currency and taxation. A global multinational can pay in dollars, a regional entity can pay in euros, and a national entity can pay in British pounds.

Aria Crescendo also minimizes the friction of product delivery so purchases can be consumed immediately. Delivery speed is now a business imperative as product lifecycles are expected to decrease by as much as 40% by 2020.

Aria Crescendo provides these key capabilities:

• Product management with a dynamic catalog and flexible pricing and promotions including subscription, usage pricing, bundles, promotions, coupons, and credits.
• Customer management with entitlements, customer history, and ability to create n-tiered parent/child relationships that define different levels of financial responsibility and segmented treatment.
• Billing management with agile billing, secure payments, and precise dunning.
• Financial management for MRR/ARR, revenue recognition, and general ledger integration.
• Revenue analytics with dashboards, reporting, and customer insights.
• Aria Active Orchestration™ to synchronize events and data across the business, coordinating push-pull actions in CRM and other systems to better manage recurring revenue and delight customers.
• Cloud connectivity with full benefits of the cloud for efficient and scalable billing and monetization.
• Out-of-the-box integration to go live quickly with a broad library of APIs for B2B connectivity as well as FTP data sharing.
• Enterprise-ready for carrier grade reliability, security, and scalability without compromise.
• IoT-ready, enabling the monetization of the widest variety of usage-based offers, packages, and plans. Monitors and manages rich usage/consumption data, and supports the free movement of device assignment from one account to another.

"Aria Crescendo raises the bar for cloud billing," said Tom Dibble, President & CEO of Aria Systems. "It's the first agile billing platform designed with the end-customer in mind. Ultimately Aria Crescendo helps the line of business optimize every account to meet exacting customer needs, create initial sales, and upsell and cross-sell opportunities at every customer touchpoint. Customers have greater choice, buy more and are retained for longer periods of time. The ultimate payoff is increased customer lifetime value and sustained growth."

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.

Aria Systems and the Aria logo are trademarks of Aria Systems, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.