TechRadar Verdict
If your company needs a more efficient way to bill customers for your products and services then Aria Systems makes a great first stop.
Pros
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Powerful and scalable
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Reassuringly robust
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Great reporting
Cons
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Quite complex interface
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Aria Systems provides businesses with a better way to manage and sell their products based around a cloud-based monetization platform. Along with offering powerful billing capability business users can make use of the many features and functions inside the system to manage recurring billing over time. Taking the lead from older style subscription services, Aria Systems has developed its platform to offer a broad range of SaaS services, which makes it more versatile but also affordable.
- Want to try Aria Systems? Check out the website here
Aria can basically replace more inferior billing systems that can’t handle businesses that need to scale quickly and dynamically. Aria creates systems that will appeal to several key sectors, including technology, communications, media and publishing, automotive, industrial and the financial services industry.
Pricing
As is the case with many products of this ilk, Aria Systems invites potential customers to explore its capabilities by organizing a demo of the cloud-based software. This allows businesses to determine what the system is able to handle, in terms of your data and requirements, but it also lets the Aria advisors guide you in the right direction in terms of what you’ll need to get started and then keep things running moving forwards. Therefore, walk-up pricing isn’t currently published.
Features
The Aria Systems platform can deliver a range of options for businesses, including account management, product and pricing management, usage rating and charging plus billing, invoicing and payments.
The system is also adept at dunning and collections management, plus active orchestration. This latter capability means that businesses can optimize their core billing process more effectively and automate many specific areas without the need for complex and costly coding work needing to be done.
In addition, Aria offers a range of extensions, which help boost the appeal of the platform. These include the Aria Data Streaming Service, Marketplace Suite, Media & Publishing Site along with Aria for Salesforce.
Performance
Considering all that Aria Systems cloud-based software is capable of, including dealing with large volumes of data, the performance you can expect is up there with the best of them. Granted, you’ll need to spend time getting used to the quite complicated user interface in order to exploit all of those performance characteristics. Nevertheless, the two variations on the theme platform: Aria Crescendo and Aria6 are both more than able to deal with most challenges put on them, no matter what the industry they’ve been tasked to take on.
Ease of use
Aria Crescendo and Aria6 are the two applications that form the basis of this cloud-based system and it’ll take a little familiarization to get the best of the controls. Thankfully this system also comes with a very good level of user documentation, which helps you pick your way through the feature-rich application. You’ll need to tweak and fine-tune your implementation of Aria, by first configuring it and also choosing which payment gateways are to be used.
From there it’s a case of building your catalog, managing coupons, discounts and promotions as well as handling billing. You can even generate complex reports from within the user interface. Getting up and running is pretty straightforward just as long as you follow the setup documentation methodically.
Support
Aria Systems comes with a full support portal, which is able to offer help to registered users. It’s possible to submit a ticket and follow its progress towards getting help from the right person. It’s also possible to email support staff in order to get on top of any issues with logging in as well as permissions. Compounding that is the Aria Developer Central arena, which is an area that allows users to work through any or all of the documentation relating to the different versions of Aria; in other words Aria Crescendo or Aria 6.
Final verdict
Aria Systems has developed a formidable platform for any business that needs to take care of subscription billing requirements. The cloud-based software is ideally suited to numerous industries, including technology, communications, media and publishing, automotive, industrial and financial services. It's also easily scalable too, so if you need to bulk up its capability over time then that should be relatively straightforward to do.
While the user interface side of things isn’t one of the easiest you’ll ever need to get your head around, anyone with a little bit of data-driven nous should be able to master its innermost secrets. Aria Systems also does the decent thing and backs it up with copious amounts of user documentation, and also has a sizeable support team too. All things considered, this is a product that’s well worth exploring if you have sizeable billing and monetization needs to take care of.
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