Salesforce tie-up already 'huge' for Aria, says co-founder

It has been just two-and-a-half months since Aria Systems clasped hands with Salesforce, but the honeymoon period has already been extremely fruitful for the billing specialist, says Brendan O'Brien, its co-founder and chief innovation officer. Although wary of disclosing actual numbers, O'Brien reports that a substantial amount of the order flow has come via the software-as-a-service giant, currently valued at about $225 billion on the New York Stock Exchange. "It is a huge driver of our business right now," he told Light Reading. "It is enormous."

Founded in 2003, Aria belongs to a crop of new-look business support systems (BSS) specialists now pitching wares to the telecom sector. The old model was to buy a full suite of software, deploy it on-site and phone the supplier whenever problems arose. With Aria, the idea is to host in the cloud, pay for what's used and slot in other vendors for the stuff that isn't billing. The trouble, says O'Brien, is that many telcos still want to deal with a sole supplier, even if they're desperately unhappy with that old model.

"They're sick of it," he said of an unnamed telco that has approached Aria. "They have issued a tender and want best-of-breed components and for it to be standards-based. But they still love the idea of having one throat to choke. They like the commercial monolithic nature of that but dislike the technology monolithic nature of it."

Billers and fillers

All of which helps to explain the tie-up between the 250-person company and Salesforce, with its 79,390 employees at the start of 2023. About two years ago, Aria was putting a huge amount of effort into partnership activities to make sure it could satisfy these commercial needs. It dawned on O'Brien and his team that finding a reliable, long-term match with "an Aria-sized hole in its portfolio" was the optimal solution. Enter Salesforce, seemingly just as keen to fill that billing hole as Aria was to be the filler.

The "obvious answer," is how O'Brien came to regard Salesforce. "Not only do they have a lack of a biller in their BSS portfolio, but like us they are true native SaaS, not faux SaaS, not faux cloud, and there is an awful lot of that floating around out there, especially in the telecom world," he said, with some harsh words for the traditional telecom vendors now painting themselves as "cloud native."

Couldn't Salesforce have built its own biller? In 2020, it spent $1.33 billion on a takeover of Vlocity, another software provider then deriving an estimated 60% of its revenues from the telecom sector. Analysys Mason, a consulting and analyst firm, reckoned at the time the deal would have a "wide and varied impact" on the telecom industry and its players. Yet Vlocity didn't have the billing software that is Aria's speciality, and O'Brien is not surprised to see that nothing subsequently emerged.

"If you haven't been marinading in billing, then when you try to code your way out of a billing problem you learn quickly just how hairy and endless that problem ultimately is," he said. "I think some bright people at Salesforce and Vlocity looked at it, thought about it and went 'Oh my gosh, I don't want to touch that.' So they kind of said we'll handle it with partners on an opportunistic basis."

The more formal arrangement with Aria appealed to Salesforce, he believes, due partly to ease of integration. Using an application programming interface (API) it developed, Aria was able to "ingest" Salesforce's product catalog in a way that other billers could not, O'Brien claims. There is no exclusivity in the agreement for either company, leaving Salesforce free to work with Aria's rivals. Yet more casual liaisons between Salesforce and other billers have left integration issues only partially solved, says O'Brien. The risk then is of customer service taking a hit.

Still, Aria has undoubtedly heard the criticism that a partnership with partner-mad Salesforce means little. "Oh great, you got a cheque for $30,000 and all of a sudden you are a partner. Congratulations," is not an untypical response among analysts who know anything about Salesforce, according to O'Brien. "But that is not at all what we have with Salesforce. We have a very tight go-to-market process with them."

The relationship has also involved some collaboration on artificial intelligence (AI) based on Salesforce's Einstein platform. From Aria's perspective, this has entailed anonymizing customer details, dropping that into what O'Brien calls a data-feeding platform and then making this available to Einstein or another large language model. This removes the risk for Aria of exposing confidential information should a customer quiz the AI about bills.

Sound and fury

Aria's deal with Salesforce is not the only such partnership in town. Indeed, it has been likened by James Crawshaw, a principal analyst with Omdia, to the tie-up between Amdocs, with its billing expertise, and Microsoft, with its portfolio of customer relationship management products. O'Brien says the comparison is "appropriate" but insists there are big differences.

"It is dissimilar in practice because I doubt that the sales engineers at Amdocs and the sales engineers at Microsoft even know one another's names," O'Brien said. "It is trying to deliver an important message but it's not a thing of significant substance beyond the demo they unveiled at MWC last year, as far as I have heard. And we have seen no evidence of it from a competitive nature."

He sounds equally dismissive of the Ericssons and Nokias of the world in the market he occupies. "All they are really doing is taking their on-premises thing and putting it in a managed hosting environment and going cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud," he said. "It is the same solution with a crappy wrapper written on it and almost certainly scaled down in terms of its functional capability, because they didn't even bother to write an API around all of it. We were born this way."

Cloud native or not, the legacy providers still cater to a sizable chunk of the market. The telco appetite for "one throat to choke," as O'Brien puts it, may be largely responsible, along with some cultural inertia, perhaps. But Aria can today point to a growing list of telco clients, including Liberty Latin America, Telstra, AT&T-backed Gigapower and EXA Infrastructure. After its bullish update on the Salesforce deal, Aria will hope even juicier contracts lie ahead.