DATASHEET - Aria Billing & Monetization Platform Features & Benefits

DATASHEET

Aria Billing & Monetization

Platform Features & Benets

Aria Billing & Monetization Platform Features & Benets

Speed & Agility Without Compromise

Aria Billing & Monetization Platform is purpose-built for multi-dimensional customer choice. It enables businesses to better serve

and retain today’s ever-demanding customers, including both individual consumers and business entities who require oerings

that meet their preferences. With Aria Omni-node™ technology, a hierarchical, n-tier product catalog and account management

architecture, enterprises can create customer/business oerings and elegant account structures in real-world variations.

Customers are aorded greater choice to match their purchasing and consumption experience—paying only how and when

they want—versus conforming to constraints and frustrations imposed by the enterprises’ outdated billing technologies.

While other platforms are focused on how products are sold, the Aria platform 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 inecient and manual processes or forcing companies to abandon initiatives that capitalize on these market trends.

Aria Billing & Monetization Platform is the rst monetization platform to provide multi-dimensional customer choice by

enabling highly tailored product oerings that support the new customer business reality. User-friendly congurations dene

attributes including: pricing, promotions, discounts, consumption options, payment methods, dunning processes, product

and account hierarchies, and business terms such as payers, channels, business units, geographies, and entities.

Aria Systems provides speed and agility at scale in the cloud, delivers actionable customer insights, and empowers business

users with direct control to better monetize their oerings. The Aria platform can deliver operating improvements with

increased protability while adhering to ever greater compliance requirements.

DATASHEET

Aria Billing &

Monetization Platform

Features & Benets

Billing & Monetization Expertise

Top among considerations when evaluating a cloud monetization platform is experience. Aria’s domain expertise in complex,

subscription and usage-based billing has been cited as a core dierentiator by analysts

. The DNA makeup of Aria’s

experienced team across leadership, product, and development is derived from a balanced combination of subject matter

experts and thought leaders in billing, payments, security, and IoT. At Aria, exceptional value is placed on product

development and quality, and on customer satisfaction. This is reected in every dollar that is reinvested in the business.

Sophisticated implementations and dependable implementation timelines are Aria’s specialties no matter which deployment

options are being provisioned. Aria’s accomplished professional services organization and adept partner network boast the

industry’s best scorecard for on-time, on-budget implementations.

In every facet of the organization, through every step of sales, implementation, and ongoing customer success initiatives,

Aria acknowledges and embraces the extreme complexity that is intrinsic at the enterprise level. Aria is lled with enterprise

professionals who have extensive, proven billing and BSS/OSS expertise, and who carefully listen, analyze, and diagnose

before they prescribe.

1 Lily Varon, “The Forrester Wave™: SaaS Billing Solutions, Q4 2019,” https://www.forrester.com/report/the-forrester-wave-saas-billing-solu-

tions-q4-2019/RES141091, 18 November 2019.

Fig.2: Aria Systems, Inc. Enterprise Portfolio

Monetization Platform

Features & Benets

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Aria Billing &

Monetization Platform

Features & Benets

Product Management

The Aria platform supports a broad range of sophisticated monetization models from basic monthly subscription to complex

hybrid oers that include subscriptions, usage, and intricate business rules. The platform enables exible subscription lengths

including any multiple of days, weeks or months. This functionality is provided out-of-the-box and is applied via conguration,

not coding. Conguration is managed directly within the system using the platform’s UI. It can also be accessed from third

party applications such as CRM or web site/front ends using the platform’s standard APIs, which allow integration with all of

the platform’s capabilities. The range of subscription models is facilitated via the platform’s product management function that

includes a powerful and exible product catalog. Through conguration, multiple service types including one-time purchases,

recurring, and usage-based, can be created. A product congured within Aria can have one or multiple services associated

with it. Usage types can be set up within the application. These usage types can be congured to track and monetize anything

that can be counted - including days, hours, users, gigabits of data, storage, usage count, miles, and more.

Aria Billing & Monetization Platform is second-to-none in the exibility of its features. Whether a company has a single rate

card for services or hundreds for the same service, whether a company sells in one currency or many, even if every customer

pays an entirely dierent rate for services under individually customized contract structures. New products can be built and

rolled out in minutes with exible pricing, bundles, and promotions. Discounts can be iterated quickly and applied

automatically, and older oerings can be decommissioned on any schedule.

Fig.3: Limitless Monetization Models

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Aria Billing &

Monetization Platform

Features & Benets

Dynamic Product Catalog

Product teams are empowered with direct control and a signicantly superior product management experience with the

Aria platform. With its intuitive rapid-launch capabilities and the industry’s greatest array of monetization models, product

managers can now price, bundle, promote, test, and iterate oerings with unparalleled speed and agility.

While other platforms are built for corporations focused on how products are sold, Aria is built around how customers buy.

And those customers demand choice. Aria’s exclusive Omni-node™ technology supports innite standard and

customer-specic permutations of products, pricing, bundles, and promotions. Product managers benet from the advanced

engineering of the Omni-node™ technology that enables elegant product creation, iteration, and catalog utilization without

bothersome proliferation of product SKUs.

Industry standard product catalogs are too at and too rigid. The Aria product catalog is n-tier and hierarchical, enabling

product subscriptions to be built as combinations of options called rate schedules instead of dening each unique

combination as a separate subscription product. No development dependencies exist, therefore, when a subscription

becomes eective, e-commerce sites and self-service portals can immediately pick up the subscription.

Aria’s clients can outpace changes or competitive pressures on-demand and lead the competition with the ability to quickly

create new, innovative oerings that meet customer-specic needs. To do so, clients can leverage the platform’s exible

pricing features including recurring, one-time, trials, rollover, hybrids, future plans, overage and group plans—a nearly

limitless array of product catalog agility to drive improved outcomes for business segments.

Promotions & Discount Engine

Functional alignment with strategic business objectives makes Aria’s product management tools the analysts’ choice.

Included as part of the Aria platform is the patent-pending discounting engine, which allows for the creation of reusable

objects that can apply discounting mechanisms from broad to granular levels, applicable to specied products or product

types, based on time or use-bound usability, and targeting specic accounts. The discounting engine also has capabilities

for inline or osetting general ledger and customer statement treatment. In short, Aria oers the most comprehensive and

highly exible array of tiered pricing options in the industry.

DATASHEET

Fig.4: Omni-node™ Technology

Aria Billing &

Monetization Platform

Features & Benets

Aria Product Catalog

Monetization Platform

Features & Benets

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Aria Billing &

Monetization Platform

Features & Benets

Promotions are 100% congurable. Catalog pricing constructs and components can be overridden in either value and/or

structure on an individual account, or on a purchase-based promotion. Free trials are oered in many forms, and can be

daisy-chained to oer time-bound, step-up or step-down pricing to innite levels, leveraging the Omni-node™ architecture.

Coupons can be dened for broad or narrow use, can be pre-congured to expire based on time, use boundaries, or both,

and can be attached in many-to-many relationships with pre-dened, reusable discount rules. Additionally, sub-sections of

the larger product catalog can be easily carved out and associated with one or many promotion codes. This allows front-end

systems to maintain no internal logic when providing access to alternatively priced oerings.

All promotional bundles created in the Aria platform can either be made immediately available, or may be planned for

availability at a set future eective date. Aria ensures proper treatment of the promotion, including sourcing where the

promotion was applied, and the conversion to a non-promoted oer when the promotion expires. This is one of the

capabilities unique to the Aria platform. Other subscription billing providers cannot yet support this level of sophistication.

Quote Simulation Support

In Aria, pricing simulations and quotes are managed through the Aria UI, Aria for Salesforce, Salesforce SDKs, any front-end

integrated system or any other integrated system as desired by a client. Pricing capabilities are fully customizable both

within the product catalog and tailored as specic rate schedules. Live quoting (with or without tax detail) is made possible

on-demand with Aria’s do-not-write functionality. All of the detail of the order pricing and quotes can be presented to any

system, and committed to Aria through an internal or external-to-Aria approval process, converting the Quote to Order/PO, etc.

Multi-Channel Distribution

Uniquely, Aria’s product catalog supports guided selling, cross-selling, up-selling, and add-ons to customers or direct sales

channels without requiring logic to be built in front-end systems. A library of intuitive integration tools makes it possible to t

sophisticated multi-channel requirements of the enterprise - providing limitless opportunities for product reach.

Usage & Consumption Modeling

The Aria Billing and Monetization Platform is designed to serve the needs of IoT data monetization and the digital

transformation era, supporting Monetization of Things™ (MoT) strategies.

Taking lessons learned from unbending monolithic platforms, with

the Aria platform, emerging enterprise LOBs are fast-tracked to

become agile disruptors. Securely in the Aria cloud and with no or

minimum intervention from IT; congure, monitor and manage

consumption-rich data down to the most granular individual service

and the device level, while easily supporting multiple devices per

account (and even beyond products per device), and the free movement

of device assignment from one account to another. Usage is monetized

through many available billing models: for example, at-rate-per-unit,

free with overage charges, tiered, volume discount, high-water-marked,

and more.

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Aria Billing &

Monetization Platform

Features & Benets

Billing Mediation

The Aria platform ingests all consumption data which can be monetized and billed in arrears according to one of many

available billing models. This includes those that are record-level or aggregated with hierarchical rollup capabilities.

The platform supports business use cases that center around complex usage management requirements. For example,

integrated seamlessly with an existing ERP, the Aria platform will pull raw data that it then correlates, aggregates, and

analyzes based on pre-congured rules which ultimately determine the most appropriate rate to be applied.

The Aria platform is certied to load and rate millions of usage records per hour, in real-time, and handles a large volume of

usage, both rated and unrated. Usage features also include loading, rating (and re-rating), taxation, monitoring, billing and

analysis. Analytics supporting invoiced usage amounts are equipped with insights at the most granular level, for nance and

customer care needs.

Customer Management

With Aria, go farther with digital capital; where customers are changing the game, insights are changing the rules. The Aria

platform has state of the art real-time visibility across customer touch-points, which in turn improves the customer experience.

On par with the improved customer experience is the most intelligent design for enabling sophisticated account hierarchies, in

service of the many inter-dependent needs of enterprise clients and partners. The Omni-node™ architecture supports innite

permutations for accounts.

Omni-node™ Hierarchical Account Management

Aria’s Omni-node™ technology supports n-levels deep account hierarchies which Aria’s customers employ to support their

individualized business models. Customer use cases include using the Aria account structure to represent not only true

customers, but also departments, channels, companies, or even physical devices, and sub-groups within.

Aria accounts are designed to support deep detail. They support various sub-items of billing for responsibility levels, which

can be designated at any level of the hierarchy for features such as charge calculation, usage accumulation, payment

responsibility, statement and invoice presentment.

Account Management

Aria Billing and Monetization Platform is purpose-built to expand the denition of a

subscriber account, allowing for an endless level of exibility for agents to elegantly manage

each plan purchased as well for each device, and other service-level products. There is a

one-to-many relationship between an account and the services to which it subscribes,

supporting unlimited combinations of billing rules: including a clean and simple amendment

process, multiple service and billing addresses, pricing models, pay methods, and collection rules,

all maintainable within a single account.

DATASHEET

Aria Billing &

Monetization Platform

Features & Benets

Customer Renewal

A substantial part of agile billing is exibility with contract management. Managing these challenges eectively can have a

positive impact on renewal rates, churn, and revenue.

Aria’s contract management oers clients exibility in dening how contracts are handled during use, as well as at renewal

time. What is more, subscriptions in Aria may be attached to customers either without a contract structure or with overlaying

contract structures. The platform’s congurable considerations include contract scope, term, custom charge schedules, and

penalties.

Leveraging Aria’s many customizable notication templates, users may dene contract expiration

notices to send to end users with customizable notication intervals prior to contract expiration,

as well as machine-to-machine event notications from the platform to any congured active listeners,

alerting of any approaching contract expirations.

The combination of Aria’s exible contract management and customizable notication capabilities gives

Aria clients a competitive edge in customer satisfaction and retention.

Multi-currency & Multi-language

The Aria platform is highly congurable and supports multi-currency requirements and it has been designed to support the

report-based integration needs of general ledgers to this end.

The platform supports any ISO country, any ISO currency, all currency, numerical, date formats, localization to any time zone,

and storage of any data element within any language-including multi-byte character sets. This enables global enterprises to

provide product oerings and messaging to any customer, anywhere. Moreover, clients may prescribe curated oers to

customers in particular countries or geo-segments for a catalog of specic plans within a campaign.

Outbound customer-facing email messages generated within the platform are fully global. Messages are fully customizable

and template-driven, including invoices and statements, in support of any language, invoice and memo numerical ordering,

and currency.

Financial Customer Care

Essential to any enterprise’s success is managing collections risk. Aria’s capabilities for complete 360-degree view of

customer account information, dunning and dispute hold support combine to ensure improved customer satisfaction,

increased resolution rates, and reduced days sales outstanding (DSO).

Customer History

The long-term health of the customer relationship is directly beneted by experiencing short-term and immediate value with

on-demand customer insights. Aria is experienced in this domain, having enabled clients for over a decade with success in

monetization and an activity-based view of customer value. A key enabler of this success is clean, accessible records on

customer history, both in-view through the Aria UI, through reporting, or through any API-enabled call center and CRM

integrations, such as the Aria for Salesforce.com connector. Purposefully and for the benet of Aria clients, the platform

process management tools are extremely strong. Full “click by click” audit history is tracked, retrievable, and never purged

as is every interaction capture by the platform with end-users.

DATASHEET

Aria Billing &

Monetization Platform

Features & Benets

Billing Management

In today’s hyper-competitive environment, being rst to market provides an unmistakable advantage. This is why

enterprise-market success necessitates a exible, congurable billing platform that can not only handle a wide variety of

subscription and usage-based monetization models, but one that also has the ability to change these models quickly and

without IT intervention. The agility the Aria platform provides, enables quick and easy reactivity to new opportunities, and rapid

response to competitive pressures, while minimizing churn. Traditional IT systems are designed for processing eciency, not

business agility. Aria’s billing management system is designed for both.

Agile Billing

An attractive outcome for any recurring billing system is to operate as a lights out automated process— automation with

minimal manual intervention. With the Aria platform, there is no need to manually execute a billing process. Only on an

exception basis.

Aria’s automated and nightly batch processes identify all accounts that need some type of action taken on them, including:

•

Processing expired contracts

• Managing plan and status rollovers

• Updating queued plan changes

• Generating all invoices for accounts with the current anniversary date (subject to lead/lag calculations)

• Generating electronic collections and managing exceptions

• Generating and sending account statements

• Evaluating and taking action on dunning steps based on the dunning plans and rules applied to the subscription

There are numerous system-wide behavioral options available that govern a multitude of behaviors (e.g., whether to charge a

credit card immediately or not, whether to construct an initial invoice immediately or not, which status code to apply to newly

created accounts such as active or pending, whether to push an account to a Universal Billing Day such as the 15th of the

month, or to apply anniversary day billing, and many, many more). Additionally, and in order to support maximum exibility,

most of these behavioral options can be overridden at the time of any API call via optional input parameters.

The Aria platform provides several out-of-the-box features, both congurable/customizable and automated, to minimize churn

and provide a more positive customer experience in the event of credit card declines and other processing failures. First, Aria

automates the distillation and distribution of fully customizable, template-based email notications to customers. Second,

where oered by a given processor/gateway (e.g., Chase Large Enterprise (aka Stratus/Paymentech), Worldpay (North

America and International), Ingenico, Adyen, etc.), Aria automatically ingests and applies changes to credit cards such as

re-issued card numbers, updated expiration dates, etc. Third, and most importantly, Aria oers an industry-leading,

comprehensive and fully congurable dunning engine, which allows Aria clients to build dunning plans that dictate the

series of actions to be automatically performed beginning at the moment a card is declined and/or an account enters a

past-due state.

Monetization Platform

Features & Benets

DATASHEET

Aria Billing &

Monetization Platform

Features & Benets

Invoicing

The Aria platform provides a robust set of invoicing functionality. Invoicing is managed on a nightly basis. The system

automatically selects and invoices any account that is eligible for invoicing.

The platform supports multiple billing cycles including daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, annual, and custom

intervals. Each billing interval is set for the recurring charges and separately for usage-based charges. When a plan change

is performed mid-cycle, as opposed to aligning with the end of the billing period (also supported), pro-ration is applied, or, if

desired—not applied. Invoice timing is also congurable; immediately or on the next billing date.

Additionally, Aria enables options for review of invoicing prior to committing the results and transmitting to the customer and

nancials system(s) in two ways:

1. Pending Invoice: creates a pro forma invoice for review.

2. Invoice Posting: once an invoice has been created / committed it can be designated for review prior to posting to the

nancial system and transmission to the customer. If an Invoice is voided prior to posting, Aria voids and reverses all

invoice line items, tracks this history / audit trail internally, but does not need to send reversing records to third party

systems, as the invoice was not yet posted.

Aria’s clients go further with Aria’s invoice capabilities including exible delivery and invoice format options. Custom client

elds are available for invoice templates, tax and item detail presentment, and full statementization capabilities, among

other advanced features. For fully-branded statements, combine charges, taxes, credits, payment, and balance information in

one place.

An unlimited number of templates may be designed (including invoice/statement templates), and preferred invoice/statement

templates are automatically assigned to individual accounts based on customer segmentation (such as geography, language,

customer type, specic products purchased, etc.) and those automatic template assignments can be easily overridden at the

individual customer level as needed via either Aria Administrative UI or API. Invoice/statement templates can be designed in

either human-readable (HTML, text, PDF) or machine-readable (XML) templates, and machine-readable templates can be

routed using Aria’s workow feature or any web-service-capable 3rd-party system for “nal mile” distillation and distribution.

It is also typical, when working in the context of large service providers, that the invoice line item detail is transmitted to a

third party system for consolidation and inclusion in a statement for physical and /or digital distribution. The platform is

integrated in this fashion for a number of clients, and has a congurable XML extract that can be reused and congured to

meet requirements.

Branded Invoices & Statements

Deliver the experiences buyers want by going beyond the experiences that they would expect. A brand is a reputation, so

why should any business have to forego brand at the important touch-points of statements and invoices?

Aria’s invoice capabilities include exible delivery and invoice format options, custom client elds available for invoice

templates, tax and item detail presentment, and full statementization capabilities including credit and payment detail, among

other advanced features.

Broad invoice design and customization capabilities are a specialty of the Aria platform, for delivering clients’ sophisticated

and often consumption-based business models that do their part to transform data into meaningful invoice and statement

presentations.

DATASHEET

Aria Billing &

Monetization Platform

Features & Benets

Distributed & Split Billing

The design of the Aria platform permits massive exibility for the support of complex, multi-layered business models of many

types, including split billing and sponsored plans. This also allows duplicate, unique, or custom invoices/statements to be

sent to multiple parties based on the hierarchical relationship and the account settings, without restriction to terms, payment

amounts, or percentage owed by party. Purposefully to the enterprise and its channels, the design of the Aria platform is the

most extensible platform supporting the most sophisticated distributed and split billing needs.

Change Management

Aria’s change management features the ability to comprehensively support amendments to products and subscriptions with

the expected and intended proration logic.

Powerful automation in the platform means that all transactional, taxation, entitlement, and nancial reporting consequences

are fully automated. Importantly, this includes all possible proration models and all possible eective date models.

There are three scenarios for proration models: charge-only proration, credit-only proration, or both. Eective-date models

cover the gamut of immediate, on customer billing anniversary date, or on arbitrary past or future dates.

With Aria, fully automated support is provided for handling amendments that result in “net negative” proration consequences,

including application of credits for future consumption, automated refunds, or discarding of negative remainders. Because

every enterprise has unique needs, all of these behaviors are governed by congurable system parameters.

The dexterity of the platform enables ve proration solutions, governed either by conguration or case-by-case. Clients may

apply Aria’s replace-plan functionality to upgrade or downgrade a subscription product. Moreover, working with eective date,

they can select the intended assignment: assign on anniversary, assign immediately, and assign in future.

Choices include the plan being queued for addition until the next account billing anniversary, or immediately, or any future

date. Proration options include: no proration, all proration (credit old subscription plan and debit the new one), charge

proration only will debit the new subscription plan only (and ride out the old one for the cycle), credit proration only will

calculate and apply a prorated credit for the remainder of the billing period for the old plan being removed. Other assignment

scopes include remove plan, de-assign immediately, on anniversary, or in future.

The Aria platform is exclusive in oering this many proration capabilities. Moreover, the presentment of this to client end-users

is clear, as are account logs for client agents, as well as all of the downstream reporting in support of nancial teams and their

revenue reporting purposes.

Multiple, Secure Payment Service Providers

Processing payments securely, accurately, and consistently is an integral component of monetizing recurring oerings. Aria

supports several payment processors to provide a fully automated, secure, and seamless payment and charging capabilities.

Aria’s fully secure, PCI Level 1 certied solution supports real-time charging and payments by credit card, debit card, ACH,

direct debit, or SEPA transfer. PCI Level 1 means the Aria platform is certied at the highest level to hold credit card

information, not simply a tokenization of the credit card. This can be valuable for large enterprise clients who wish to adjust

which payment processor handles which pieces of their businesses. You can optimize card payment processing costs, using

a more aordable vendor for a region or business segment or strategically distributing risk across multiple payment partners.

Aria provides direct post functionality or a hosted payment page so Aria’s clients can accept credit card payments from their

customers without the need to be PCI compliant.

DATASHEET

Aria Billing &

Monetization Platform

Features & Benets

Fig.5: Payment Integrations

Recovery

Payment requests can be declined for a variety of reasons, including account number replacement or expiration,

insucient funds or credit limit, bank system maintenance, temporary network problems, network rules that conict with

method of payment, and account expiration. Aria makes it easy to reduce your failure rate on card transactions and

payment requests with Account Updater. This service checks for updated card numbers, reprocesses them automatically,

and noties you of the change. It’s all fully congurable, fully scalable, fully auditable, and fully automated within Aria. When

payments do fail, they are automatically retried, then secondary payment methods are tried etc. Failed payments can also start

integrated dunning processes or they can use Aria Active Orchestration to trigger special processing across your ecosystem.

Dunning

Most enterprise business lines have complex needs

related to end-user notication, card retry attempts,

grace periods, fees, and ultimate de-provisioning of

non-paying accounts. Additionally, these needs dier greatly when the direct and indirect business models are compared

against one another, and dier still within the indirect business model when end-customers and partners are compared

against one another.

The Aria platform dunning engine, exible array of billing-behavior conguration settings, and the workow feature combine

to give the market a powerful and exible set of capabilities to completely automate the dunning process, both today and as

policies change over time:

•

Send notications and reminders to customers through their preferred communications channels (including mobile and

IoT devices), congure orchestrated escalations in multiple stages, and dierentiate escalation procedures based on

product line, account group, or other factors such as method of payment.

Aria’s payment processing capabilities can recover as

much as 40% of declined revenue. This capability is

extended to multiple card types, including American

Express, Visa, MasterCard and Discover cards.

Figure 6 is an example of one style of retry

logic that the Aria platform supports. For clients with

dierent needs, this logic is fully customizable.

DATASHEET

Aria Billing &

Monetization Platform

Features & Benets

• Manage service delivery based on a customer’s payment status, and reduce potential revenue leakage by leveraging Aria’s

seamless service activation to suspend service automatically at any stage in the escalation process, or continue to deliver

service as long as demanded by business need.

Aria’s dunning process is ecosystem-aware. Even when collections are managed from an ERP platform, Aria Active

Orchestration ensures automatic management of service delivery based on payment status. This is congurable by business

users, providing the agility necessary to make decisions at the speed of business.

The platform’s dunning plans support any number of steps, and within each step, any combination of customizable email

notices to the customer, retries of credit cards, applications of at or percentage-based late fees, and/or gradual degradations

of service. Aria clients can construct as many distinct dunning plans as they desire, then apply those plans to specic

segments of their account base, based on geography, customer segment, or payment method type.

Financial Management

Aria Billing and Monetization Platform considers the many enterprise business-need viewpoints and delivers synthesized

processes and systems that increase automation while streamlining data and actionable insights for a full-ow

monetization ecosystem.

Global Taxation

Aria oers a native tax engine that fully supports national and federal taxes and state and province taxes, including support for

tax-on-tax and tax-dependent-taxes models. Clients can congure tax rates to perform VAT, GST, and other tax calculations in

the Aria platform. For exceptions, tax settings can be congured so that the object, which has pricing associated and charges

calculated, at the most granular level, can be agged as globally non-taxable and therefore will not be included in any tax

calculation. In addition, should a service item be potentially subject to tax in any jurisdiction, the item would be agged as

taxable and associated with the appropriate tax group (such as software, hardware, dial tone, etc.).

For more demanding n-levels deep of taxation, Aria has fully-built

integrations to the following global taxation platforms: Avalara, Vertex,

Sovos Compliance, and Thomson Reuters OneSource. All options allow

for real-time, integrated, best-in-class global taxation capabilities,

including both pricing simulation and refund support.

Revenue Recognition Support

Aria’s revenue recognition management solution provides the following capabilities and benets.

• Comprehensive support for the full spectrum of transactions possible with extremely exible and agile recurring revenue

business models.

• A single-source system of record for all recurring revenue recognition activities associated with accounting, reporting, and

forecasting applications.

• Automated accounting and reporting processes, encompassing prepaid, postpaid, at-rate, variable usage-based,

progress-based, etc., with controlled data access and congurations.

•

Seamless integration of the solution with the GL system, other nancial systems, and all analytics applications, at

summary and detail levels, with extensive built-in auditability.

• Task-focused, simple, and consistent user interfaces making the complexity of revenue recognition transparent across

operations and the end-customer.

Monetization Platform

Features & Benets

DATASHEET

Aria Billing &

Monetization Platform

Features & Benets

Aria is experienced with 3rd party revenue recognition integrations as well. Clients with particularly sophisticated recognition

rules (e.g. arbitrary partial recognition, arbitrary calendar recognition, inter-product/multi-factor conditional recognition) opt to

use purpose-built third party recognition systems, and Aria provides both pre-congured and customizable tools for

integration to such systems.

General Ledger Integration

Seamless integration is possible with the Aria platform to General Ledger systems, other nancial systems, and all analytics

applications, at summary and detail levels, with extensive built-in auditability. All ERP General Ledger integrations are

bi-directional, with inbound-to-Aria functionality typically a synchronous application of externally-sourced payments, credits

and refunds, and outbound-from-Aria functionality typically batch-based and asynchronous.

As a cloud service specializing in enterprise monetization, and dealing with nancial data whose controls aect a company’s

general ledger, the platform has been year-over-year audited since 2007 (formerly SSAE 16 or SAS 70 Certication) to ensure

for the appropriate SOC 2 Type II controls global organizations depend on.

Uniquely, the Aria platform supports customers requiring multiple General Ledgers. All fully-customizable data extracts,

including those in support of feeding downstream general ledgers, can be sent in any format to any number of destination

systems, and each extract can be fully customized to contain only the product and/or account segments relevant to it.

Integrate & Tailor Processes with Active Orchestration

Aria Active Orchestration integrates the Aria platform with

an enterprise’s applications and systems to manage the

many revenue moments that occur between the provider

of a service and its customers over the lifetime of the

relationship. A core capability of the platform, Active

Orchestration leverages platform foundation APIs and

enables seamless synchronization across enterprise

systems, automating proprietary business processes

and extending Aria’s capabilities into the ecosystem.

Active Orchestration uses event payloads to synchronize data across ERP, provisioning, nancial, and other platforms without

the extensive coding or logic required by other systems. Active Orchestration works across the Aria platform to enable Aria

customers to automatically manage customer relationships based on data-driven events important to the business.

Platform APIs

The Aria platform APIs are REST and SOAP based, and provide access to all Aria functionality and data. In contrast to an

application where APIs expose only a subset of functionality, Aria allows access to anything through a rich and robust set of

over 360 APIs. With Aria APIs, access any piece of functionality exposed in the UI, and even enriched functionality not

available in the UI. The hundreds of APIs are both coarse and ne grained, which allows the appropriate detail level of data to

be accessed. This avoids the pitfall of many APIs, which can be chatty due to the number of API calls required to complete

business processes. Aria oers three types of APIs—conguration, service and reporting—with custom web services creatable

using the platform’s workow feature.

DATASHEET

Aria Billing &

Monetization Platform

Features & Benets

Events & Notications

Aria Active Orchestration takes changes to accounts, orders, payments, usage—any of over 200 events that matter to

recurring revenue—and sends a data-rich payload to synchronize the data without custom coding or manual processes.

Examples of these 200 events include: adding a new customer, changing a service plan, changing an account or account

relationship, paying an invoice, changing a payment method, or an expiring credit card. Event payloads are pushed in near

real-time and include enough actionable data for external systems like CRM, GL, service provisioning, or payment processors

to complete their task. When subscribed events occur, Aria publishes that event into the asynchronous event bus and distills

an XML document which fully describes the event and provides all naturally associated data elements to make that event fully

understandable and actionable to external systems without the need for additional API call-backs.

Clients can subscribe to any events in this library and provide fully congurable rules for one-or-more destinations of the XML

payload, determination of successful (or unsuccessful) processing of the outbound event payload, number of retry attempts,

and seconds between retries. Failed events are managed in a temporally-sensitive manner in order to guarantee that race

conditions and “out of order” scenarios never occur. The history of all published events is permanently maintained in order to

provide a way to easily re-publish any number of events within any historical time boundary in case a client ever has the need

for data recovery.

Data Access

Aria provides full data access and export capabilities, as part of the feature-rich integration capabilities for a system

purposefully designed to function in a loosely coupled environment. In addition, Aria Data Feed can continuously send all

data and data change to other applications, so you can reuse your Aria data in other applications like Analytics or CRM.

Workow

Workow is a familiar concept in enterprise software. Typically, a separate oering with separate support, Aria’s workow

feature is supported by Aria and easily congured instead of coded. It comes preloaded with Aria’s API library, in addition to

any proprietary workows designed as part of an enterprise implementation. This feature is used to codelessly dene and

automate custom business logic within Aria, between Aria and users, and between Aria and third-party systems.

The workow feature oers complete business process automation capabilities with drag-and-drop form creation, ow

modeling, and rules tables for making complex evaluations simple. It oers pre-and-post processing capabilities, captures

approvals, has a exible dashboard for status and analysis, and maintains a full audit trail. Aria’s workow feature can also

be called as a web service, eectively creating custom business APIs that do more than just add an account.

Aria for Salesforce

Proper integration is key to enterprise billing and revenue management. Aria provides a certied Salesforce connector for

close collaboration with omni-channel customer engagement. Salesforce selected Aria Systems for billing and revenue

management to complete the Salesforce for Communications Ecosystems, furthering support of Communication Service

Providers (CSPs) and the IoT. Aria connects with Salesforce to maximize features and reach, through: Monetization Process

Management – Aria automates core billing and revenue management capabilities.

• Monetization Process Management – Aria automates core billing and revenue management capabilities.

•

Product Management – A dynamic and n-level hierarchical product catalog for sophisticated subscription and

usage-based pricing, packaging and bundling, and promotions and discount management.

• Customer Management – Provides actionable customer insights to monitor and inuence behavior.

Monetization Platform

Features & Benets

DATASHEET

Aria Billing &

Monetization Platform

Features & Benets

• Cloud Billing Management – Provides lights-out billing with human intervention required only on an exception basis.

• Financial Management – Ties billing directly to the ERP system of record.

Bi-directional synchronization of all changes, a plan wizard for guided selling, and full customer account history mean the

data teams need is at their ngertips in Salesforce. The resulting payo is all the information centralized in either platform of

choice—Salesforce or Aria—to provide informed intelligence for smarter, faster decision making.

Why Aria

The world’s most demanding enterprises trust Aria, and this trust is enabled through a platform equipped with connectivity,

speed, and stability with upside returns. Moreover, clients are provided with a support team whose experience in this domain

is unrivaled.

Aria is enterprise grade - Aria recognizes that enterprise billing solutions can never be a success in a vacuum. The billing and

monetization platform is purpose-built with the understanding that no two enterprise implementations are the same, but that

all demand the highest possible levels of reliability, security, and scalability. Additionally, peaceful coexistence and tight

integration with the surrounding ecosystem of related systems and processes is crucial to the success of any implementation.

Aria is uniquely architected - more than any competing solution on the market, Aria delivers by far the widest range of

functional capabilities, through a platform that enables business agility while mitigating—if not eliminating entirely—the need

for expensive, time-consuming, custom, code-based solutions.

The highly extensible platform provides support for the most complex of product catalogs; the most advanced change

management and proration logic; endless usage- and consumption-based billing models; the most sophisticated distributed

and split billing needs; the most complex account hierarchies; a robust workow engine for codeless support of any

proprietary business processes; extremely automated billing, dunning, and collections processes; deep, intricate, integrations

with related systems and processes; and a completely integrated world-class business intelligence capability.

Aria is experienced - In every facet of the organization, through every step of pre-sales, implementation, and ongoing

customer success processes, Aria acknowledges and embraces the extreme complexity that accompanies problem solving at

the enterprise level. Aria proudly maintains a company culture that is lled with enterprise professionals who have extensive,

proven billing and BSS/OSS expertise, and who deeply analyze and diagnose before prescribing. As a result of this approach,

Aria Systems enjoys a near-zero attrition rate among enterprise customers, and takes great pride in a track record of

consistently on-time and on-budget implementations.

About Aria Systems

Aria Systems’ native public cloud monetization

platform is the analysts’ choice, top ranked by

leading research rms. Innovative enterprises like

Adobe, Allstate, Comcast, Subaru, and Telstra

depend on Aria to accelerate time to market and

increase exibility, enabling them to maximize

customer value, and grow recurring revenue through

subscription, usage-based, and one-time oerings.

For more information, visit: www.ariasystems.com.

Headquarters

100 Pine Street, Suite 2450

San Francisco, CA 94111

Phone: +1 415-852-7250

Toll Free: 1-877-755-2370

R&D Oce

600 Reed Road, Suite 302

Broomall, PA 19008

Phone: +1 484-427-8200

Toll Free: 1-866-933-ARIA (2742)

DATASHEET

Aria Billing &

Monetization Platform

Features & Benets