Aria Systems Inc., a cloud-based monetization platform, today announced Aria for Connected Vehicles. The cloud-based offering would allow enterprises to monetize connected vehicle services and ultimately generate a recurring income stream. Aria for Connected Vehicles is aimed at IoT-enabled connected cars, heavy equipment, on-demand transportation as a service, telematics, and post-sale or lease add-on services.

Aria Systems raised $50 million in February, from existing investors Bain Capital Ventures, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, InterWest Partners and Venrock, as well as new investors Rembrandt Ventures, Madison Bay Capital Partners and VMware. Brendan O’Brien, co-founder and chief evangelist at Aria Systems, said then that the company is constantly on the lookout for new subscription opportunities, and it seems the company has found one in the form of connected cars.    

“Aria for Connected Vehicles helps OEMs, third-party providers and others monetize the tremendous opportunities arriving from the wealth of valuable data streaming from vehicles,” said Tom Dibble, president and chief executive officer of Aria Systems, in a press release announcing the offering. If Gartner Inc.’s predictions pan out, there will be 250 million connected vehicles on the roads by 2020, offering up a huge market to enterprises for monetization.  

Aria for Connected Vehicles enables enterprises to monetize data by selling downstream analytics of driver patterns to insurers, cities, planners and more. The offering allows enterprises to offer online expertise to shops and dealerships; as well as the ability to bill monthly, quarterly, or yearly for road use on public and private roads. Aria for Connected Vehicles also allows the ability to rent cars, equipment, and machinery by the hour; and the ability to subscribe to a specific fleet of cars. Enterprises can generate a recurring revenue stream by creating value-added recurring services.   

Edmunds.com, Subaru, and Zipcar are already making use of services offered by Aria.

The difficult task of IoT monetization

Internet of Things (IoT) monetization has become increasingly more difficult as consumers’ interest in the market has started to wane. A report released last week from THINKstrategies Inc. and IoT monetization platform goTransverse (Transverse LLC) looks at the challenges that enterprises are confronted with when it comes to IoT monetization. Some of the challenges raised in the report include lack of value-added services and technological ease-of-use, which will be required to pique consumers interest in IoT again.

Image via Aria Systems