Aria Launches Cloud Billing For VMware

Cloud billing and subscription management solutions specialist Aria Systems announced the launch of the Cloud Revenue Adapter for VMware vCloud Director and VMware vCenter Chargeback. Designed for VMware vCloud service provider partners offering cloud services to end users, the solution integrates with the VMware solution portfolio to automate service activation, usage tracking, billing and collections.

The Aria Billing and Subscription Management Platform provides a platform for monetisation of recurring revenue models, with support for any combination of one-time fees, subscription charges, usage-based charges, as well as virtual goods and currencies. The platform delivers these capabilities in a pure-SaaS model designed to deliver faster deployment and lower ongoing costs compared to traditional platforms.

“Revenue automation and ease of use are key to accelerating the growth of cloud services,” said Dan Chu, vice president, cloud infrastructure and services, VMware. “This new solution from Aria Systems presents VMware vCloud service provider partners with a turnkey platform to grow their businesses as they deliver new cloud services using VMware vCloud Director and VMware vCenter Chargeback. We are excited to welcome Aria Systems to the VMware vCloud partner ecosystem.”

Economic opportunity

The Aria Platform also goes beyond billing automation by automating the complete subscriber lifecycle from acquisition and real-time service activation through usage tracking, billing, and collections, with integrated analytics across the entire process. Chu said that as cloud computing continues to grow at a phenomenal rate, end-user organisations are looking to cloud computing as a way to increase business flexibility while lowering costs. Research firm Gartner predicts the overall market for cloud services to grow to $148.8 billion (£272bn) by 2014.

“While this growth represents a huge economic opportunity for cloud service providers, traditional approaches to automating revenue streams have fallen short for many providers,” Chu said. “Home-grown systems are inflexible, constrain business agility, and distract and divert internal resources. Traditional billing platforms are expensive, complex, and on-premise solutions that weren’t designed for the pay-as-you-go world of cloud computing.”

To make it possible for VMware vCloud service provider partners to harness the revenue-generation opportunity that vCloud Director represents, VMware and Aria worked closely together to integrate the next-generation solutions. The product, known as the Aria Cloud Revenue Adapter for VMware vCloud Director, leverages the VMware vCloud and VMware vCenter.

Chargeback APIs to provide integration capabilities to automate cloud service monetisation, including synchronisation of account information, with native support for VMware vCloud Director constructs such as organisations, virtual data centres and virtual applications (vApps), synchronisation of both flat-fee and usage information for VMware vCloud Director including instances, storage, CPU, memory, and network bandwidth and support for VMware vCloud Director’s allocation pool, reservation pool and pay-as-you-go resource models.

“The cloud services market now has an obvious choice for revenue automation,” said Mike Morini, chief executive of Aria Systems. “Aria Systems and VMware have worked together to integrate the industry’s leading cloud billing platform with the world’s most widely-used virtualisation and cloud platform. Together, we’ve paved the path to the future of cloud monetisation.”