For a while now, companies have ‘dipped a toe’ in recurring subscription models but few have bet their business on it like Adobe is doing. They’re going ‘all in’ and completely turning their traditional business on its ear. Although it has had a subscription offering for a year, Adobe announced that they will no longer sell any shrink-wrapped software (their mainstay “Creative Suite” product) but will only sell subscriptions to their “Creative Cloud” moving forward, which will include all product updates for all active subscribers.  No more shelling out thousands of dollars for the latest version or hundreds for an upgrade. It’s just $29.99/month for current customers and $49.99/month for new customers. They already have half a million paying Creative Cloud subscribers and two million users who subscribe to their free services.

It’s quite interesting to read the many negative comments about Adobe’s announcement which say they are making a big mistake. I believe what’s being missed is that this is giving Adobe a huge opportunity to sell to customers who would never spend the money for its flagship product  in the first place, while giving their current customers the opportunity to lower their cost while increasing the length of the customer relationship. History is littered with initial pushback from customers; here are a few memorable examples:

• “People will never use their credit card to buy anything on the Internet.” (clearly, we know how that has developed)
• “No one will pay $5 for a cup of coffee (Starbucks)”
• “No one will wait for a movie in the mail when they can go to the video store and get one immediately (Netflix)”
• “No one will want a motorized contraption for transportation because it isn’t as dependable as a horse.”

YouTube isn’t betting the company but is recognizing the potential of adding a subscription platform to augment their current rental and ad-supported revenue streams. YouTube is adapting to the need for their content providers to have more flexibility in their revenue possibilities, a lesson that the traditional television cable giants have so far avoided learning. Those cable giants insist that their customers buy their 250+ channel blocks regardless of which channels their customers actually want. As a result, they are seeing their customer base gradually migrate away to services such as Hulu, Netflix, and iTunes that will give them what they want to watch, when and where they want to watch it.

In the above examples, we can see one of the basic tenets of business playing out: cannibalize your own business or risk someone else doing it for you.  As risky as some people think these kinds of bets are, history will show them to be visionary in how they created new revenue streams and changed how they conduct business.

I think both Adobe and YouTube are betting with strong hands.  Let’s see how they play out.

- Andy Eliopoulos, Aria Systems

Download the new Six Considerations for Buying a Subscription Commerce Solution e-Paper or Anatomy of Recurring Revenue Model whitepaper.

And from Mashable announcing YouTube jumping on the subscription commerce bandwagon, “YouTube is set to launch a paid subscription model for its specialist video channels as early as this week, according to a report. The move. . . will serve as another source of revenue, according to the Financial Times.”

For those of you looking to transform your existing SKU-based offerings into recurring services, or launch brand new services, Aria can help make this a successful reality. In fact, we recently took some big name companies’ subscription initiatives to market–companies such as Experian, VMware, Telecom Denmark, AAA, and Quark to name a few. Our technology, combined with our deep experience and best practices, makes Aria the optimal partner for those companies considering such innovative initiatives.

Overall there were quite exciting developments in the industry over the last week, all of which validate the sea change underway. Adobe, YouTube, SAP, MSFT and others are now firmly committed to being on the recurring revenue train and, recognizing that in order to do it right, it requires a comprehensive next generation billing and subscriber management platform—this is where Aria can help the cause.

Just let us know – we’re here to show you how and get you to market quicker than you ever imagined. Furthermore, once you have launched, our technology will empower you to continuously tune your model based on the behaviors of your target customers and overall market trends. When this shift to the recurring world is well-executed, everybody does indeed win except, of course, your competitors.

Download the new Six Considerations for Buying a Subscription Commerce Solution e-Paper or Anatomy of Recurring Revenue Model whitepaper.

–Tom Dibble, CEO, Aria Systems

The Aria Cloud Subscription Billing Platform was chosen by brand name companies such as AAA NCNU, Experian, Pitney Bowes, Red Hat, Ingersoll Rand, EMC, VMware, and HootSuite to grow or evolve their recurring revenue.

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When an audit rolls around, it’s no walk in the park for the folks in Production Operations.  Each audit season, we must prepare ourselves for more than just the monetary cost of hiring an industry-leading firm.  We must also buckle down to face the added workload, extra man hours and heightened stress levels that come with audit preparations.  We do this because we know and understand the importance of scouring every dark corner of our system to ensure our existing security measures are not just “good enough.”  We spend several weeks prior to the audit putting ourselves in the mindset of our auditors.  How can this check be enhanced?  Where else can that monitoring tool be utilized?  Which machines can be patched proactively to get us ahead of the game?  What evidence can we provide to prove our business justifications?  Pulling thousands upon thousands of files for this prep may be time consuming and tedious, but we take our responsibilities to our customers very seriously – especially when it comes to their trust in our ability to handle their data securely.

After our prep work is done comes the real deep dive.  Now, there are audits, and then there are audits. Our audit partners provide the latter.  It is important to note that an audit is only as good as the trustworthiness and reputation of the firm who does the digging.  And, you certainly get what you pay for.  It is a sad and scary fact that some vendors actually choose less expensive auditing firms that hardly scratch the surface.  For half the cost, it’s a sure bet you’ll end up with half the effort.  As far as we’re concerned, that just says, “We care half as much about keeping your credit card number safe.”  This is simply not acceptable at Aria.

We do everything we can to guarantee the safety of the information entrusted to us, and it is absolutely crucial to this undertaking that we bring in a reputable third party to lend a pair of fresh eyes.  We invite them to question our judgment.  We implore them to be as critical as they can.  We don’t want anyone to tip-toe around our feelings because we refuse to entrust your data to the “sugar coating” friend who tells us that terry cloth bucket hat is still cool.  We sleep better at night knowing we’ve enlisted top tier firms to tell us, “That’s some bad hat, Harry.”

Erin Byrnes, Aria Systems

The Aria Cloud Subscription Billing Platform was chosen by brand name companies such as AAA NCNU, Experian, Pitney Bowes, Red Hat, Ingersoll Rand, EMC, VMware, and HootSuite to grow or evolve their recurring revenue.

Download the new Six Considerations for Buying a Subscription Commerce e-Paper, or the Anatomy of Recurring Revenue whitepaper.

The market is usually amazed when we talk about Aria’s multi-tenant cloud offering with its rich functionality and enterprise-grade operational capabilities. But having a great product alone is not enough if you can’t get it implemented. With eleven implementations in the last 100 days, and another fifteen on schedule for Q2, 2013, I’m proud to deliver real value to our customers sooner than later.

Participating in an implementation planning meeting with a client or prospect is one of the most enjoyable aspects of working at Aria. It gives me the opportunity to discuss many different business models, help our clients expand into new markets, and quickly introduce new products into the marketplace. During these early discussions, when the implementation plan is not fully vetted and well-understood, I usually get asked “How long will my implementation take?”  To which I reply “it depends”.  The level of complexity of a project combined with the client’s time-to-market need drives the length of any implementation. We’ve had Fortune 500 customers launch innovative new lines of business, end to end, in a matter of weeks. Whereas, other large scale projects with a high degree of billing complexity or business process change management issues can take several months. What I love about working with Aria’s platform and our implementation best-practices is that they’re both equally comfortable at both ends of the spectrum.

The implementation of a billing solution is complex and the Aria Implementation Services team’s primary goal is to make yours as fast and painless as possible. There are several aspects to consider when thinking about your solution, most notably: the robustness and complexity of your products and services and how they will be represented in the product catalog; integration with other systems like an e-commerce portal, third party taxation engine, payment processor and financial system; consumption/usage management, data migration, and reporting requirements just to name a few.

Other factors include the project team composition, number of team members, remote versus onsite support, and executive commitment to implementing the solution. We work with our customers to ensure the implementation plan includes deliverables for each project milestone, a clear definition of the scope, and contingency plans that serve as insurance and offer peace of mind when unplanned issues arise.

Even the most successful implementations can disrupt a company’s business. To mitigate the risk, we help educate our customers on the Aria platform such that each user understands how the new billing system will be integrated into the overall solution. Users are trained to take full advantage of the system’s capabilities because a lack of training almost certainly guarantees challenges somewhere down the line.

I appreciate the dedication that goes into each and every successful implementation. From the customers to the Aria teams involved, it takes a well-orchestrated methodology and seamless coordination to get a company live in as little as six  to eight weeks.  If you are one of the 15 Aria customers going live this quarter, my sincerest thanks for being a part of the Aria ecosystem.  If you are not yet an Aria customer and are in need of a subscription management billing solution, check us out and see what we can do for you. As I see you through your implementation, one thing I can assure our customers is that even though my initial reply may be “it depends”, I am certain that our implementations are the most dependable in the market.

- Jim Alexander, VP of Implementation Services

The Aria Cloud Subscription Billing Platform was chosen by brand name companies such as AAA NCNU, Experian, Pitney Bowes, Red Hat, Ingersoll Rand, EMC, VMware, and HootSuite to grow or evolve their recurring revenue.

Attend the next Enable Recurring Revenue webinar, or download the new Six Considerations for Buying a Subscription Commerce Solution e-Paper or Anatomy of Recurring Revenue Model whitepaper.

Come with me, if you would, to Philadelphia circa 1979.

I landed a job as a paperboy. On my first day I went to my pickup location and was handed a big stack of that day’s issue of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, along with a sheet of densely-typed paper with the names and addresses of all of the customers on my route.  Beside each name was one of three subscription designations:  “Daily”, “Sunday”, or “Daily plus Sunday”. My manager was apparently not aware I could read fluent English and had a 3-digit IQ so he nicely explained to me what each designation meant. He further pointed out that since today was Monday I would need to deliver to just those marked with either “Daily” or “Daily plus Sunday” (sigh) and then sent me on my way.  I was, however, given one more piece of critical advice, “Don’t lose this list, Brendan!” And so, with great dedication, I delivered my papers.

What was interesting is that I did not get another list on Tuesday!  Nothing at all!  Did that mean that I had no papers to deliver that day?  Au contraire!  It meant something simple, albeit more labor intensive than having Tuesday off.  Getting NO list at all meant “There are no changes to your route since the last time we gave you a list”, or “Keep doing the same thing you did yesterday!”

Over the course of the next year-and-a-half of my paperboy career, my manager informed me only of the CHANGES I needed to make to my route. Who the new customers were, who were the customers that wanted to change from one type of subscription to another, and who were the ones who were so shockingly unimpressed with my amazing fold-and-throw-from-my-careening-bike-skills that they had opted to cancel their subscriptions entirely.

My point? Efficiently delivering a subscription should NOT require a service provider to ask a central system, each and every time, if it’s time to deliver a subscription. Should I deliver to this guy?  How about this one?  How about this one?  OK now how about this one?  Instead, the central system (aka the system of record, say, your billing system) should automatically tell you who your customers are and what they get. It should push incremental changes to you as they happen with the assumption that, until you receive further instruction, the current list is what to deliver! And if your billing system (aka the central system of record) has the capability of pushing that information out to you the instant any change occurs, well, all is as it should be.  It’s a simple and elegant solution provided your billing system can do it. It removes a cumbersome and unnecessary step when it’s time to give them the service they have dutifully paid you to receive.

- Brendan O’Brien, Chief Architect & Co-founder, Aria Systems

The Aria Cloud Subscription Billing Platform was chosen by brand name companies such as AAA NCNU, Experian, Pitney Bowes, Red Hat, Ingersoll Rand, EMC, VMware, and HootSuite to grow or evolve their recurring revenue.

Download the new Six Considerations for Buying a Subscription Commerce e-Paper, or the Anatomy of Recurring Revenue whitepaper.

Building credibility with a prospect is the single most difficult task when it comes to enterprise SaaS billing solution selling. Why? The industry is new and emerging so prospects tend to need education, reassurance, and guidance, not to mention that three or four other solutions may claim the same thing: “We are the industry’s leading subscription billing solution!”  So which one do you go with or trust for that guidance?  This is where the billing solution provider’s own client voices come in.

Prospects are less impressed with how you may claim to relate to their problems and are more impressed with what YOUR customers have to say and the actual challenges that they face.  Whether it’s someone the prospect knows (a big wig in the business world) or a universal truth in the industry, it’s ultimately the customers’ endorsement that counts.  So if you’re serious about enabling current and future recurring revenue streams, make sure to ask a potential billing provider: “Who are your customers? And exactly how did you enable their recurring revenue initiatives?” In a marketplace full of broad and bold claims, the real experiences of real customers may be the most important guidance you can find.

- Jen Wilson, ADR, Aria Systems

The Aria Cloud Subscription Billing Platform was chosen by brand name companies such as AAA NCNU, Experian, Pitney Bowes, Red Hat, Ingersoll Rand, EMC, VMware, and HootSuite to grow or evolve their recurring revenue.

Download the new Six Considerations for Buying a Subscription Commerce e-Paper, or the Anatomy of Recurring Revenue whitepaper.

But to make this happen for our customers, technology partnerships become vitally important.

Take for example the experience of buying an electronic device, whether at a big box retailer or online.  When you buy an electronic device it is now a common practice to be asked if you’d like to sign up for an extended warranty, a service plan, or even a subscription back up service for some amount per month or year.

This is great for the vendor. They are making more money from the transaction then they would have otherwise. But from an IT systems perspective, things are not so simple. When you buy a physical item, the vendor must execute that singular transaction; when you buy a recurring service, the vendor is starting an ongoing relationship with the customer which then must be effectively managed.

Managing this ongoing relationship has more implications than we can go into here but there is one thing for certain:  businesses that embrace recurring revenue models with the intent to improve customer relationships gain a significant competitive advantage. This is because maximizing the relationship potential versus simply managing the recurring transactions skyrockets the Lifetime Value (LTV), an important measure of the growth possibilities for any business.

One of Aria’s marquee partners, Elastic Path, had the foresight to see the potential in better management of customer relationships as part of the commerce cycle.  I invite you to visit Elastic Path’s blog, GetElastic, to learn more about this visionary company and the exciting innovations that we are jointly bringing to market to address the challenges of recurring revenue in digital commerce.

- Mike Gerardi, VP Channel Sales and Business Development, Aria Systems

The Aria Cloud Subscription Billing Platform was chosen by brand name companies such as AAA NCNU, Experian, Pitney Bowes, Red Hat, Ingersoll Rand, EMC, VMware, and HootSuite to grow or evolve their recurring revenue.

Attend the next Enable Recurring Revenue webinar, or download the new Six Considerations for Buying a Subscription Commerce Solution e-Paper or Anatomy of Recurring Revenue Model whitepaper.

It’s 5:35 a.m., and we need to make the call – roll out or roll back. Slow-loading pages, hung API calls, mistyped commands – these are the time-consuming mortal enemies we face at this ungodly hour when minds are not as sharp as we’d like them to be. We are testing brand new code on a live environment – if anything goes wrong, the world will see it – and we only have 25 minutes left in our window of announced downtime. Once we hit 6:00 a.m., our customers will start hitting buttons.

When I first started at Aria, we certainly had our ups and downs with rolling out new code. With every new release, there are expected fixes, added features, streamlined dashboards… our customers look forward to the unveiling of a better product. But in order to deploy new versions of Aria, we had to take a complete outage for two hours and pray nothing took longer than expected. This was a weak spot for our company, and it needed to be remedied.

Fast forward, two years later. These days, we migrate new code through a process called LiveRelease, and it is very near and dear to me. I have managed these migrations since the dark days of “4:00 am Outages,” and I can tell you the road was not easy. But it certainly was worth it. Now, we are able to release new code on a steady schedule with zero downtime. We now have the ability to migrate and test new versions of Aria with no customer interruption. And since we have this ability, this also means we can execute a LiveRelease during normal business hours, when all resources are available – and awake!

Of course, we always migrate to our testing environments first. But it is the nature of the beast in IT that no two environments are ever truly identical. We must be prepared for unexpected behavior when moving code to a customer-facing environment. With 4:00 a.m. Outages, we would not know if issues existed until the code was brought live – visible to customers. With LiveRelease, we can now move the code directly to a customer-facing environment, while keeping the new version hidden from the customers until we are 100% satisfied with the quality. We are no longer restricted to a window of time, and no longer performing delicate work at odd hours.

This is just one of many examples of how the dedicated minds at Aria are constantly striving to raise the bar when it comes to quality products, quality service and quality delivery. We hope our customers enjoy the reduction in scheduled downtime and improved quality as much as we’ve enjoyed sleeping in on Saturdays!

Erin Byrnes, Aria Systems

I am proud to be working in a company whose mission aligns with this kind of thinking. Aria Systems has a SaaS billing platform unlike many of its competitors because Aria’s legacy has been solving business complexity for large enterprises. Continuing this tradition, Aria’s recent innovation solves the complexities of billing in a wholesale channel environment. Channel billing has been traditionally a complex and disjointed process for enterprises. Aria’s billing platform simplifies channel billing by “templatizing” the entire channel creation and management process. The module not only allows enterprises to bill their distributors and reseller for the products they resell,  it also allows enterprises to charge their channel partners for the usage of the billing system, essentially enabling a true billing-as-a-service (BaaS) model. And it enables all this functionality being on the cloud. I think this is a great example of simplifying business complexity. Aria’s customers already love it!

-  Shashi Kedilaya, Aria Systems

As with all situations, however, things tend to change.

It just so happens there’s a certain based-in-a-fantasy-world TV show returning to a premium cable channel at the end of March, and I’ll be riddled with woe, remorse, and self-loathing if I happen to miss any second of it. Simply put (and all joking aside), my needs have suddenly changed.

Luckily the cable company I deal with grants me the ability to call at any time, even one minute before the show premieres, to add the channel I want. I can then call as soon as the last minute of the last episode is over to cancel said channel. It’s fast, it’s easy, and it saves me money. Suffice it to say, this makes me feel slightly wonderful about my decision to deal with this particular cable provider.

The key to this situation is something that’s often overlooked when signing on with a business, even though it can become suddenly and significantly important. You see, the key here is that the company is flexible and agile. They understand their customers don’t exist in some sort of stasis and that their needs will evolve, oftentimes in unexpected ways. So companies not only have to constantly revise what they offer in order to meet their customers’ evolving needs, but they also need to allow their customers’ needs to be easily and swiftly addressed when they do change.

I couldn’t help to think of my blithely analogous cable TV dealings when I found out about an issue that an important client of Aria’s had recently. When the client first signed on, Aria configured for them a SaaS subscription billing system that worked perfectly with their current business model. Through the course of time, however, this client realized that the business model they were employing was not an optimal one to move their company forward, so they decided to drastically modify their billing methodology.

One of their major concerns was how this bold change to their entire business model was going to affect the subscription billing service that they already had in place. Lucky for them it really wasn’t going to affect it at all, because Aria’s solution accounted for a few different pain-free options to address the wholly new way that this client was going to do business going forward. These multiple solutions not only allayed all of the client’s concerns, but also afforded them the freedom to choose the remedy that was best for them at the time.

Aria was able to help the client in this fashion for two reasons. First, because of their knowledge, expertise, and ardent concern that the client is getting all they need from the Aria system. And secondly, because the Aria platform has unrivaled flexibility—not just the kind that can easily handle all the small day-to-day changes that the business world hurls at you, but the kind that can also smoothly and adroitly conduct a sea change to how your entire subscription billing process will function.

As I said, when we start making plans, sometimes it’s extraordinarily difficult to predict when change will come. The only thing we know is that it will come, because all things change. So, when something as important as your business changes, flexibility suddenly becomes vital. During those times, when you’re navigating your way through the turbulence that change often yields, knowing that you’re dealing with a company and a product with a hallmark of astounding agility can be a tremendously reassuring and invaluable asset.

-   Steve Pisarek, Aria Systems