Aria Systems provides a cloud-based monetization platform that eliminates billing bottlenecks, enabling companies to launch and evolve their offerings quickly. Pulse 2.0 interviewed co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer Brendan O’Brien to learn more about the company.
Brendan O’Brien’s Background
What is Brendan O’Brien’s background? O’Brien said:
“After studying history and music at the University of Pennsylvania, I initially pursued a career in the performing arts as a classical singer. At the same time, I was managing a theater and taught myself to write software code for selling theater tickets. Over time, I dug deeper into code writing and programming and began writing software for different billing needs in the medical, credit card, and telecom sectors, among others. This ultimately led to the formation of Aria Systems, which offered a new kind of billing platform that leverages SaaS and cloud – then called web services – to provide one system to any business with billing requirements.”
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for the company come together? O’Brien shared:
“Billing platforms were traditionally created to serve particular industries. In some cases, these systems were incredibly large, expensive, and had to be installed on-site. In others, they were very simplistic and unable to manage more complex tasks. As companies began to embrace the idea of SaaS, we saw an opportunity to build a single, SaaS-based billing platform that would be maintained by us, that would not need to be physically installed on site, and that would have the horizontal capability to support any industry.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? O’Brien explained:
“Our core product, Aria Billing Cloud, has a wide range of features and capabilities to help any business manage complex usage-based billing models. We are unique in that we focus exclusively on making Aria the best billing platform available while, at the same time, enabling Aria to seamlessly plug into any business’ technology environment. Our API-first functionality and strategic partnerships with ServiceNow and Salesforce enable users to connect us to their ecosystems, so they are always benefitting from a single unified back office system experience.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since its launch? O’Brien noted:
“The Aria platform has always been in a constant state of evolution and refactoring, never more so than in recent months with AI continuing to drive a monumental shift in our business. In addition to bolting AI capabilities onto services we already offer, we are continuing to roll out new AI powered products like Aria Allegro, which is the first native AI-powered SaaS mediation, rating, and charging engine for any business at any scale. Our agentic AI framework, Aria Billie Connect, connects AI agents from external systems to Aria to access billing information that can be used to resolve customer inquiries. We have also introduced our own natural language AI bot, Aria Billie, that leverages billing data to resolve customer inquiries with greater speed.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? O’Brien cited:
“Securing our first telecom customer in 2018 was a major achievement for Aria. When we first launched the company, the telecom industry was only interested in billing systems built specifically for voice, data, and text. A platform like Aria was not seen as tailored specifically enough to handle the industry’s complex requirements.”
“As telcos have diversified and introduced non-traditional service offerings in recent years, they have come to recognize the attractiveness of the horizontal billing capability we offer. Telecom now represents our single largest industry. We’ve grown our portfolio to more than 20 telco customers and have even displaced legacy billing systems built exclusively for telecom use.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking O’Brien about customer success stories, he highlighted
“Along with our achievements in telecom, Aria has extensive stories of success in the media and publishing industry. Media and publishing companies are unique in that, as they digitize their businesses, they still need to retain the legacy aspects of their business. Billing for both digital and print would require these companies to invest in and manage entirely separate billing systems as digital subscriptions are typically time-based while print subscriptions are delivery-based – an apples-plus-oranges challenge.”
“To solve it, Aria built an industry-specific extension to our core platform, Aria Media & Publishing Suite (AMPS), that eliminates silos and bridges that divide between digital and print business lines. Our extensive roster of media and publishing clients using AMPS are able to roll out digital services, manage legacy print customers, and offer a mix of the two through bundles and unique offers.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? O’Brien affirmed:
“Aria is unique among our competitors in that we are solely focused on delivering the most advanced billing capabilities to our users. Unlike virtually everyone else in our space, Aria is not looking to develop CRM, ERP, EPC, or CPQ products. We partner with the two most significant SaaS business platforms, Salesforce and ServiceNow, both of which offer all of these adjacent capabilities but lack enterprise billing capabilities, and therefore use Aria to fill that need. While we maintain our narrow and deep approach, we also pursue opportunities to build extensions to the platform and new features that address specific industry needs and use cases.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? O’Brien reflected:
“Standing on stage at this year’s Aria Recur, our annual customer and partner event, and recognizing just how far we’ve come is one of my favorite recent memories. This year’s event took place in Portugal and was the most well attended to date. I often refer to Aria as “my other child”, so seeing the company I created achieve this stage of maturity was truly gratifying.”
Future Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? O’Brien concluded:
“In addition to growing our roster of users and partnerships, we want to encourage a change of mindset among businesses and help them begin to regard billing as an opportunity for differentiation and not as a necessary evil. Billing data is incredibly rich. It can be combined with other intelligence sources to solve problems. It can expose customer sentiment that can now be more easily unearthed by AI. As datasets become richer and more voluminous, it is our goal to help companies recognize the value of billing data, capture the tidal wave of data on the horizon, and monetize it all on a massive scale.”
