Tuneful sounding tech player Aria Systems is has released its eponymously named Aria for Connected Vehicles technology.
This cloud-centric software is aimed at software application developers building for IoT-enabled connected cars, heavy equipment as well as on-demand transportation as a service and telematics.
The software itself is designed to be used by software engineers who want to create and test IoT technologies. So far it has been used by Subaru and Zipcar among others.
Recurring revenue
The overall thread here is designed to help drive firms away from traditional product or even transactional sales focused business models to new (often more service based) approaches with long-term recurring revenue customer relationships.
According to the firm, “Industry disruption is opening up new opportunities for recurring revenue streams from services inside and outside the vehicle. Yet, legacy business systems can’t enable the go-to-market speed or the agility required to adapt to the evolving end-consumer preferences that new revenue models require.”
According to the June 2016 Forrester report by Frank Gillett, The Retrofit Future of the Connected Car, “It’s time for product CTOs and CIOs to explore the tech to support new services.” He adds, “Follow the lead of the CMO in targeting specific customer experiences. Now is the time to start mapping and strategizing the IoT technologies, software and data integration, analytics, enterprise architecture, and IoT software platforms that you’ll need.”
Aria for Connected Vehicles promises to help manage the monetization of subscription and usage-based IoT services without compromising enterprise-grade scalability, performance and security.
Infinite combo options
With Aria, connected vehicle offerings can be constructed into an infinite combination of one-to-one and one-to-many permutations of users, data services and devices.
The platform uses Aria’s Omni-node technology, a hierarchical approach to accounts, which claims to be able to ensure that billing precisely reflects what is owed — whether the implementation requires split billing (e.g. employer-pay/employee-pay) or management of a vast collection of assets, such as fleets of IoT-enabled vehicles.
The Aria platform integrates with technology ecosystems including: smartphone apps, entitlement/provisioning systems, payment processors, as well as existing accounting/GL systems to provide a view of accounts, activity, invoices and accounting.
Trends to takeaway
Your technical takeaway here will, quite evidently, be that entire ‘platforms’ are now being presented which claim to be able to act as foundations for hosting, developing, re-channeling and/or finessing application development itself to be more specifically IoT aligned as is very much the case here.
It is certainly interesting to see telematics and on-demand transportation tabled in the same sentence as connected cars and heavy equipment… time to fire up the digital engines of all shapes and sizes then.