Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Interview with Tom Dibble, CEO of Aria Systems (Part 1)

Tom Dibble is the CEO of Aria Systems, a company that offers the unique cloud-based “Aria Subscription Billing Platform,” which enables enterprises to manage subscriptions and billing. Tom holds a degree in economics with honors from the Syracuse University and has more than 20 years of enterprise experience, having worked for Goldman Sachs and Company, BEA Systems, and Oracle. In this interview he shares with us the features of the Aria cloud-based platform and discusses examples of use cases for which the platform, including telecom, industry, and open source.

Sramana Mitra: Tom, tell us a bit about what Aria Systems does and what your background is.

Tom Dibble: Aria Systems provides the world’s top enterprise cloud billing and subscription management system. We enable companies of all varieties and business models to optimize recurring revenue in many ways. I have been in Aria for four and a half years. Prior to Aria I was with Oracle Systems. Prior to Oracle I was at BEA Systems. Oracle then acquired BEA. At those two companies, I got firsthand experience around companies trying to transform and design some of their business models, deployment models and monetization models to support a more service-based business.

This model presented a lot of challenges as far as billing systems and infrastructure goes to support their business. I joined Aria, and this is precisely the challenge we saw with companies that either want to overhaul existing businesses or launch new initiatives, and do so efficiently and cost effectively.

SM: Let’s do three case studies of your existing customers.

TD: Let’s start with new initiatives to show you the wide variety of models that we enable today. One is a company that has been around for 100 years called Ingersoll Rand. They saw a very large opportunity to provide recurring services for consumers and small businesses for remote services, home security systems, and home climate control systems – being able to access and control many aspects of your home through a smartphone. They wanted to launch this quickly and with maximum flexibility once it was live, because they were not sure what the right pricing, packaging, and bundling was going to look like.

They launched this service and have been very successful. You have a traditional company from the industrial space that now has a thriving line of business offerings in consumer service on a recurring basis. Were it not for Aria, they would have not been possible to do as quickly and efficiently as they did.

On the other hand, you have a newer generation of cloud services, like platform as a service and infrastructure as a service. These are a blend of use-based business models and subscription models, aimed at large companies, small companies, and even individuals to some extent. They want to launch this service, and in doing so they bring a broad range of monetization strategies. They chose Aria to do that, and we have made the service successful and it is thriving. Those are two of the types of companies we have been working with, next to launching more classic next generation services to their consumer base.

Those are two examples of initiatives we are seeing launched. As I described, BEA and Oracle want to take the business in a direction the current billing has proven to be a constraint on, and they need next generation technology to move forward. An example of that would be Telecom Denmark, Scandinavia’s largest provider for residential services. In the EU they wanted to launch triple and quad play residential services and be able to provide a variety of consumption-based models to the consumers around use and on-demand services as well as classic subscriptions. Their existing billing infrastructure would not allow this in a time frame or a level of flexibility and efficiency they needed. They partnered with Aria to enable this, and they launched the service with success in Denmark.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Interview with Tom Dibble, CEO of Aria Systems
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