Aria Systems announced the launch of Aria for Communications, a cloud-based monetization platform for communication service providers (CSPs) designed to remove billing bottlenecks and help businesses create, introduce and test digital services tailored to their target markets.
The platform can be integrated into legacy systems and helps businesses disseminate customer data to the correct systems as needed, as well as iterate a product catalog of services and pricing across market segments, geographies and currencies, according to the company.
The product catalog allows business users to quickly create, modify and sunset new products that support limitless combinations of pricing, dependency and exclusion models ranging from the simple to the complex, with no need to involve engineering resources in those efforts, the company said.
“From the very beginning Aria was designed to integrate with external systems—CRM for any customer communication and data, ERP for financial management, specialized rating and mediation systems, entitlement management, a myriad of payment gateways,” Brendan O’Brien, co-founder at Aria, told eWEEK. “We have more than 300 APIs ready for other systems to access and to process data, transactions and payments.”
Another feature is an extensible data model, which permits businesses to extend the data definition of all key objects such as products, accounts and subscriptions in ways that suit the needs of the enterprise without having to open the hood on the underlying system.
In addition, a configurable omni-node account structure supports any set of arrangements of human account holders, business entities, devices and locations.
This can help lessen the impact imposed by legacy business support systems (BSS) designed for flat and fixed location-based service delivery, which do not flex sufficiently for the IoT-centered world, according to the company.
Finally, an active orchestration toolkit supports a level of integration between Aria and external systems that cannot be achieved via an API alone and requires no custom coding to be deployed.
“Product life cycles are significantly shorter now; consumers expect more choice and flexibility; and new products, services and packages must go to market in days, even hours in the case of competitive response. With legacy systems, this often takes weeks,” O’Brien said.
But with Aria, he noted, control is handed to the lines of business so they can quickly configure packaging, pricing and promotions that better meet customer demands of customized solutions to meet their specific needs.
“A business user that manages a portfolio of products in a CSP will find Aria powerful and easy to use,” he said.