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Professional Background

MM: Ed, give us a little bit of your background, your role at Aria Systems, and a short summation of your career?

ES: This is my fourth startup. I’m an engineer by background.

Prior to founding Aria, I founded a very large affiliate for a brandable virtual ISP called LaserLink. We managed the ISPs for Gateway, Compaq, Amway, IBM, and Univision Online. I sold that business to Covad Communications in 2000.

It was through that experience that I realized that billing is hard to do. There are a lot of things that people overlook when deciding to manage subscription-based services and distribution of digital content. Distribution of any content is painful if not done properly.

About Aria Systems

MM: Would you give us a background of Aria Systems, starting with the corporate name and story, and then the nature of its business.

ES: The name of the company is Aria Systems. We are incorporated in Delaware, but we reside just outside of Philadelphia, PA. Our website is www.AriaSystems.com.

We provide billing and customer management software. We deliver that software as a service. That means our customers don’t have to manage any of the data or infrastructure. We offer high-function software. Software that—prior to us—would cost hundreds of thousands or millions to purchase. And then, a similar range of costs to operate and maintain.

We offer our clients that high end billing functionality. We charge them on a pay-as-they-go model. That means that we charge them based on how much of the software they use.

MM: As software as a service firm, do you compete with enterprise software providers of similar high-function software? And if so, with whom do you compete?

ES: In terms of functionality, we see a range of competitors. The most direct competitor to us would be a telco-based subscription-management software company like Portal, Amdocs, Convergys. But we also see competitors like PayPal, for instance. Especially in the Web 2.0 world, where people are using PayPal to manage customers.

We also have seen merchant account providers and accounting systems. From our perspective, they only really solve one kind of component or one of the functions in the customer lifecycle. The key thing about us is that we uniquely address the needs of a recurring relationship throughout the customer lifecycle, versus just solving one problem.

A lot of times, we’ll see modified shopping carts that are homegrown and attached to a merchant account. In turn, they’re attached to an accounting system.

But a shopping cart at its core isn’t designed around managing a recurring, ongoing relationship—this is a much more difficult thing to do than a one-time transaction.

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