The current Forrester WaveTMreport serves a category of buyer in the ‘SaaS Recurring Billing’ space different from the ones Aria serves. The report is a result of a change in criteria, process, and scope tailored to suite solutions for SMB customers as it broadens the definition of Recurring Billing Solutions. In contrast, at Aria Systems, we have sharpened our focus on addressing the needsof enterprise organizations.
To effectively partner with you, we have created this overview page as a shared point of reference as we collaborate and prioritize enterprise depth, scale, and team expertise as core selection criteria.
Comparison table
The table below compares the SMB criteria assessed by Forrester in this report with the enterprise needs addressed and delivered by Aria Systems.
Business need
Forrester
Broad, horizontal market solution
Yes
Yes
SMB focus, simplifying all requirements
Yes
Broad, generalized, all-in-one product suites
Yes
Integration approach with generalized point-to-point connectors
Yes
SMB-focus performance and scale with limits of API volumes, processing and storage
Yes
Solution availability and SLA 99.9% (only 3 nines)
Yes
Service level for SMB: do-it-yourself installation and self-service support
Aria Systems is a best-of-breed SaaS cloud billing provider, focused on serving customers who value GTM flexibility while expecting enterprise level scalability and performance.
Customers including Adobe, Comcast, Experian, Philips, Telstra and VMware have partnered with Aria as they recognize our ability to address their complex needs with ease. We’ve optimized their investment through our vertical-specific capabilities, strategic vendor integrations and best-in-class services.
Through our engagement with you so far we’ve identified most, if not all, of the following characteristics in your company – a set of characteristics not quite addressed by the current Forrester Wave:
Enterprise business
You operate an enterprise business, often across products and various lines of business, and generate more than $250M in overall annual revenue.
Business transformation
You seek to transform your business models into more complex offerings, such as subscriptions with physical items (XaaS, IoT) and/or consumption and usage-based services.
Industry vertical
You operate in a vertical or industry such as Telecommunications, Technology, Media, IoT or Financial Services, that demands specialized market capabilities and expertise.
Complex integrations
You need to integrate to many existing systems, while transforming how you monetize your products and services.
Total cost of ownership
You need a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), where costs are linked to revenue, to optimize operating margins.
Operational excellence
You demand operational excellence to minimize risk to customer experience and revenues. Aways-on revenue collection is critical.
Business partner
Finally but most importantly, you seek a critical business partner, not just a technology vendor. White glove services are critical.
IDC MarKETSCAPE Perspective
IDC also positions enterprise needs as different from SMB needs
IDC recognizes that enterprise organizations, which are defined as companies with more than 1000 employees, have distinct billing and monetization needs that differ from those of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). From their perspective, due to their scale and complexity, enterprises require more depth and sophistication in their billing and monetization processes. As a result, managing monetization for enterprise organizations presents unique challenges that require specialized solutions.
We are proud to be a leader in addressing these challenges in the enterprise space. In fact, IDC recognized us as a “Leader for Enterprise-Focused Subscription and Usage Management Applications” in their most recent MarketScape report, which was published in September 2022.
The following areas are essential for any enterprise considering a new billing and monetization solution:
GTM FLEXIBILITY
Sophisticated billing
Enterprise organizations require a more sophisticated billing solution that can support:
Complex products, bundling, packaging and pricing
Negotiated, one-off contractual agreements
Bundled products from value-added resellers
Multiple sales channels (omnichannel)
Dedicated business processes
Extended data capture and analytics
This is in contrast to the simple product/price/business models, cookie-cutter contracts, contained channels and fixed business processes and data needs of businesses with basic requirements.
Aria is class-leader in billing sophistication. Learn more
SUPPORT CONTINUAL DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Ecosystem integrations
Enterprises need to integrate with both their existing business systems and new planned systems as part of a broader business transformation initiative.
In contrast, suite solutions work best if all functions are used in concert, but they create a need to compromise and simplify business goals that are stepped down to the capabilities of the solution.
Aria offers extensive integration capability. Learn more
The workload and performance demands of an enterprise organization vary in terms of:
Usage processing capacity
Processing flexibility of different transaction types
Volume of invoices generated per billing period
Level of real-time invoice and insight interaction
API volumes for data intake and output
Data eventing models, extensibility and migration
In contrast, suite solutions aimed at SMBs are less focused on delivering these aspects of scale and performance. They often impose performance limits. Aria imposes no artificial limits or throttling on client platform use.
Aria is also public cloud agnostic, offering data sovereignty flexibility. The platform’s contractual SLA is 99.95% which is typically exceeded. The actual SLA delivered for the last 5 years is 99.998%.
ASSURANCE BEYOND FEATURES
Delivery and service excellence
Enterprise organizations expect:
High levels of service and support from vendors
High-performing and experienced customer support
Dedicated customer success personnel
Best-in-class on-time and on-budget implementation delivery
This is in contrast to do-it-yourself installations and a self-service approach of suite solutions serving SMB organizations.
Aria is class leader in service excellence. We are deeply involved in every implementation. Our implementation teams have an unmatched record of on-budget and on-time deliveries. 87% of Aria projects are on time, compared with the industry norm of 17%.
Aria offers an array of white glove services to help clients maximize the value they receive from the platform after go live. Our knowledge services and around-the-world 24x7x365 customer support team have a 99% first response rate and 89% overall issue resolution rate.
“In our quest to improve the efficiency of our billing processes and consolidate to a single platform, we knew from experience that Aria’s platform offers the breadth of capabilities required to manage our growing EMEA business.”
Sagheer Ahmed, Group Billing and Revenue Assurance Director, Experian
“Aria’s cloud platform features the flexibility and ease of configuration in a modern and scalable architecture that will enable us to offer new digital products and bundles while providing our markets with many billing options for our customers and solid interoperability to our larger ecosystem.”
“We empower our customers to innovate at the edge, and we believe they shouldn’t have to wait until the end of the month for their usage and billing information. Aria’s cloud billing platform allows us to provide our customers with critical data and timely information related to consumption, which ultimately enables them to be more successful.”
