Carrier Cloud Feature

Aria was chosen as a partner for YouSee’s high-speed Internet, phone and cable TV services.

The new partnership shows how cloud-based billing – known also as SaaS, on-demand, or multi-tenant – is seeing higher demand and “providers from both inside and outside the traditional BSS/OSS sector are stepping up to meet it,” according to a report from Connected Planet.

Aria customers include: HootSuite, FuzeBox and LikeList.

“In other words, those who assume suppliers from the social media and eCommerce worlds aren’t sophisticated enough to handle telco and cable billing appear to be wrong,” Connected Planet (News - Alert) said. “For Aria, the $20 million it raised early this year for market expansion from investors like Hummer-Winblad doesn’t hurt.”

Before choosing Aria, YouSee considered on-premises and cloud-based billing systems.

“The company needed a flexible billing solution that allows its team to easily create new price plans and conduct free trials, as well as offer flexibility with credits, refunds, and other Customer Service Representative (CSR (News - Alert)) functions,” according to a statement from Aria Systems. In addition, Aria had the quickest time-to-market, lots of flexibility and extensive experience with international deployments.

“Innovative companies such as YouSee have realized the tremendous value of a cloud-based enterprise billing solution,” Mike Morini, Aria Systems CEO, said in a company statement.

Aria Systems’ Subscription Billing Platform is an enterprise solution that automates the subscriber life cycle.

The “monetization” platform gives clients a flexible tool for revenue capture, optimization of cash flow, and the enabling of market intelligence, the company said.

It also cuts down operating costs during the customer lifecycle, the company adds.

Aria is seen as a SaaS billing leader. It manages over 1 million accounts and has processed more than 1 billion transactions since its founding in 2003, the company reports on its website.

YouSee relies on new products and bundled offers to increase its business.

YouSee is a division of TeleDanmark. TeleDanmark provides cable TV and Internet services to half the households in Denmark, according to a blog post from Connected Planet.

In related industry news, Gobal Convergence Solutions (GCS (News - Alert)), a Next Gen Network Solutions proprietary routing and rating company, and Razorsight (News - Alert), the leading cloud-based business intelligence and profit analytics solutions provider for the communications industry, unveiled their new initiative which will allow both companies to jointly market, present and pursue global opportunities for their products and services by leveraging the existing sales, marketing and customer bases of both companies.  

“We are very excited about this partnership with Razorsight,” said Neal Axelrad, CEO of GCS in a statement. “By collaborating on marketing and sales opportunities, GCS & Razorsight will be able to address 99 percent of a carrier's back-office needs. This partnership reduces the sales cycle and allows our respective customers and prospects to gain a greater understanding of the entire solution set available to them in the market.”