Recurring Revenue Streams Becoming Important Component of Billing Solutions

In a cutthroat economic climate, the ability to generate recurring revenue streams is a huge advantage in any vertical market. In fact, businesses are demanding the analytics and insights in their billing solutions that will help them build and sustain recurring revenue streams.

Billing platforms that can provide that information clearly have a major competitive advantage in the crowded subscription billing market. And Aria Systems is a standout, offering customers a SaaS enterprise-grade cloud platform for managing recurring revenue at scale. According to Tom Dibble, president and CEO of Aria, that capability has been a major competitive advantage for the company as it goes up against massive legacy billing and ERP companies like Oracle and SAP, Amdocs and Comverse.

“The customer is demanding [subscription or usage-based billing] in terms of how they want to consume goods and services,” Dibble told shapinginfluence Group Editorial Director Erik Linask at the recent Editors Day Santa Clara 2015 event. “They want to do so on a usage or consumption basis or want to use something when it’s convenient to them and not necessarily have to own it. Often that generates into a recurring model like subscriptions or rentals.”

Not only are consumers driving the trend toward recurring revenue streams, but Wall Street looks favorably on the predictable recurring revenue as well. The result is that companies are able to enter new markets as well as expand their footprints in existing markets where they previously may have reached a saturation point, thanks to creative usage-based billing models.

Being able to give customers the insights and tools to generate recurring revenue streams has propelled Aria to the top of the subscription billing platform market. The company was recently chosen by Forrester Research as one of three leaders in the sector in the firm’s Wave report, with some of the larger ERP players not included at all. The SaaS model certainly has something to do with it, but it’s not the company’s only competitive advantage.

“I know there’s a tremendous amount of buzz and hype around cloud and you’ve got to be multi-tenant and that’s all well and good and we’re a 100-percent multi-tenant architected system,” said Dibble. But we don’t get purchased by a company like a Pitney Bowes or Experian or Audi because we’re SaaS. We get purchased because we can get them to market very quickly.” Deployment speed and flexibility are the two main features Aria’s customers are looking for, added Dibble, and being able to provide them is what has helped differentiate the company in a very crowded and competitive market.