Aria Systems is bringing together the chocolate of usage- and subscription-based revenue opportunities with the peanut butter of increasingly connected automotive systems. The resulting candy (to complete this metaphor) that launched this week is Aria for Connected Vehicles.
This is a cloud-based monetization platform for connected cars, on-demand transportation, telematics and more. Basically, Aria can help facilitate any service that users pay for based on usage (like car sharing) or a subscription (like in-car Wi-Fi).
For more than a century, auto manufacturers have built vehicles to be sold once. One car, one customer, one purchase — until they’re ready to buy another car in a few years. Connected vehicles, IoT and automotive services are opening up these recurring revenue opportunities, but manufacturers aren’t moving quickly enough on their own to take advantage, according to Aria.
Aria Systems has been around since 2003, which can seem like a century in the San Fransisco area, where the company is based. The company has been specializing in secure, cloud-based software for recurring billing since then.
Aria for Connected Vehicles can be used by the manufacturers themselves — Subaru and Audi are already on board — or by third-party device manufacturers or services, like Zipcar and Edmunds.com. It works with smartphone apps, payment processors and existing accounting systems. When used with a smartphone app, Aria also holds customer credit card information with “bank-rate security,” for easier PCI compliance, according to the press release.
The system has as many uses as there are usage models, it seems. It can facilitate hourly on-demand access to vehicles, whether that’s a fleet of shared cars or heavy machinery. It can track mileage for usage-based vehicle taxes. It can also sell analytics of driver patterns to “cities, planners, DOTs, insurers, [and] consumers.” Aria for Connected Vehicles can help transition from cars as owned objects to mobility as a service.
Edited to correct the company’s founding date.
