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Aria Systems Announces Aria Virtual Inventory Engine

SaaS Billing Leader Expands Support for Virtual Goods for Gaming Industry

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - March 11, 2010 - GAME DEVELOPERS CONFERENCE (GDC) 2010 - Aria Systems, Inc. (http://www.AriaSystems.com), the leading provider of on demand billing and subscription management solutions, today announced Aria Virtual Inventory Engine, a new module for tracking virtual goods including virtual items as well as currencies. Aria Virtual Inventory Engine works seamlessly as part of the Aria Billing and Subscription Management Platform to provide a complete subscriber management solution for game publishers that need to manage subscriptions and track subscription and usage fees as well as virtual items.

The global virtual goods market is estimated at 5 billion dollars annually. Game developers and publishers use virtual goods to support in-game currencies and to allow gamers to purchase or trade items like weapons, armor, potions, health or magic points, experience, and more. Virtual goods offer a compelling new revenue stream for publishers to monetize virtual economies of limitless size inside today’s multiplayer online games. Publishers can now use the Aria Billing and Subscription Management Platform as a complete, integrated game monetization platform to manage subscriber lifecycles and payments from initial one-time game purchase fees to monthly subscriptions, usage charges, and virtual goods. Because Aria’s platform already supports industry-leading PCI-compliant payments across a wide range of payment processors including Authorize.net, Chase Paymentech, Cybersource, PayPal, RBS WorldPay, GlobalCollect and PayProdigy, publishers can offer a full range of choices to their gamers. They can also offer different payment processors based on geography or other business rules to minimize processing fees.

Aria Virtual Inventory Engine is exposed via an application programming interface (API) that allows developers to increment and decrement virtual resource balances, create virtual transactions, retrieve virtual transaction histories, and more. Aria Virtual Inventory Engine supports event notification, so for example, a gamer can be informed when his or her virtual inventory is depleted, or an item is about to expire based on a preset time period of item expiration. The product is delivered as a part of Aria’s SaaS platform, so there’s no software installation, hardware management, or other cost and complexity associated with legacy on-premise billing solutions required.

“With the rise of virtual goods and currencies, gaming companies have one of the most interesting and complex monetization opportunities of any industry,” said Ed Sullivan, CEO at Aria Systems. “Aria Virtual Inventory Engine extends our market-leading platform with virtual goods support to offer a complete platform to manage and monetize game subscribers.”

Aria Virtual Inventory Engine is available immediately. Please see http://www.ariasystems.com/solutions/for/gaming/ for more information, or contact Aria at http://www.ariasystems.com/contact/. Aria representatives will be demonstrating Aria Virtual Inventory Engine at the Game Developers Conference Booth #1246 in San Francisco this week.

About Aria Systems

Aria is the market leader in subscription and recurring billing solutions. Since 2003, Aria has managed over one million accounts in more than 195 countries. Aria’s Billing Platform is the billing industry’s most reliable, flexible and scalable on demand tool for accelerating revenue capture while significantly reducing operating costs. Additionally, having achieved end-to-end Level 1 PCI Compliance and SAS70 Certification, Aria Systems leads the market in security and compliance. Backed by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Venrock Associates and Dave Labuda, Founder and former CEO of Portal Software, Aria’s team of SaaS and billing experts are part of a company that billed over 2.5 million customers for $1 billion a year in transactions. Aria Systems is headquartered in Media, PA (metropolitan Philadelphia) and has offices in the San Francisco Bay Area (San Mateo, CA). Aria Systems has been ranked as the 5th fastest growing, privately held company in the Philadelphia region by the Philadelphia 100. For more information about Aria Systems, visit http://www.AriaSystems.com or call 1-877-755-2370.

Media Contacts

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Tony Keller
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