Aria Systems Puts 'Connected Cars' IoT Service In Gear

Aria Systems Tuesday unveiled the Aria for Connected Cars service, available to the San Francisco-based company’s partner base and service providers who want to rapidly create, introduce, test and scale a wide variety of IoT connected car offerings, co-founder and Chief Evangelist Brendan O’Brien told CRN.

’Connected cars don’t work without partners,’ he said. ’As large companies gravitate away from massive on-premise systems toward new best-of-breed models, partnerships are critical to the connected vehicle world.’

[Related: 10 New Internet of Things Products That Changed The Game In August]

Aria for Connected Vehicles manages the monetization of innovative subscription and usage-based IoT services without compromising enterprise-grade scalability, performance and security.

The platform runs on Aria Systems' Omni-node technology, which the company calls a ’hierarchical approach to accounts, which ensures that billing reflects what is owed.’

This architecture enables companies to manage individual accounts, as well as accounts with multiple levels of users, devices and vehicles -- including fleets of IoT vehicles, said O'Brien.

Aria for Connected Cars enables several use cases, such as road use taxation, where users can track mileage on public or private roads and then issue a monthly or yearly bill with refunds that take into account gas taxes paid, road use and vehicle types.

But the service can extend beyond connected cars, emphasized O'Brien: "The capabilities that we've built into this release translate to other verticals that are IoT-related as well," he said, including IoT-enabled heavy equipment and telematics.

Downstream analytics of driver patterns can be sold to cities, planners, insurers and consumers and the service can track traffic flows, computer heat maps and driving habits as well.

"To capitalize on the enormous number of IoT opportunities presented by the new ’connected car’ market, OEMs and third-party vendors are finding they must pivot their back-office strategy to quickly deliver customer-focused services,’ Andrew Galanopoulos, Cloud First Communications Industry Lead at Chicago-based Aria Systems partner Accenture, told CRN.

’Many legacy system environments take months to launch new services, but the new standard is measured in days – even hours,’ he added.

Aria Systems said that "flexible offers, add-ons and options can also be pushed quickly to market via all sales channels."