In a digital economy business models are constantly in a state of flux. Other than the fact that they generally involve some form of subscription revenue no one is ever quite sure how to best  price a particular good or service. As a result, there tends to be a lot more reliance on analytics applications to make sense of the overall digital economy.

Aria Systems today announced that it is making it a lot simpler to take advantage of those analytics by embedding Aria Revenue Analytics software inside its cloud service for managing billing. Designed to make it simpler to support multiple types of billing models, Adeeb Shanaa, senior vice president of products and engineering for Aria Systems, says Aria Revenue Analytics will provide a way for organizations to more easily discern, for example, which customers have the greatest lifetime value.

Previously, figuring that out would have required organizations to load transaction data into a separate data warehouse and then deploy an analytics application to make sense of the data. Via Aria Revenue Analytics, business managers can now analyze that data at no extra cost using dashboards that are embedded within Aria.

Shanaa says there are at least 30 different types of business models that can be applied using a subscription revenue model. By embedding analytics directly with Aria, business managers can more easily see the impact those business models can have on the business over both the short and long term.

One of the biggest challenges organizations usually encounter when trying to embrace the digital economy is figuring out not only what services customers want, but also how to price them. In fact, those services might have different values at different times of the month or even day. By making use of advanced analytics organizations can now more easily experiment with digital business models until they hone in on the right one for a broad number of customers, or if they so choose, even a single customer that is critical to the overall success of the business.

The Aria billing platform exposes a number of application programming interface (APIs) that are designed to make it simpler to integrate the billing platform with other enterprise applications, including ERP systems that many organizations rely on to manage the pricing of legacy business models that tend to be more static.

For solution providers, however, perhaps the single most significant thing about the Aria platform is that it represents an opportunity to have a relevant conversation about the rise of the digital economy with their customers.