Key Terms

Progressive Tiers

• Progressive tiers are like your tax brackets, where more than one tier can apply   n1 quantity in tier-1, n2 quantity in tier-2 and more until the total quantity is rated.
• Progressive Tiers can be Quantity or Balance based.

Prospective Tiers

• Prospective tiers are based on prospective (past) volumes. For example, 
  • volume from the first 6 months in a calendar year determines the pricing for the next 12 months.
  • Billing time usage rating OR 2-pass rating where the usage for the billing period is processed and accumulated in 1st pass. In the 2nd pass the accumulated value is used to determine the fixed tier that applies to all usage in the period.
• Prospective tiers are always Balance based.
• With Prospective tiers, only one tier will apply to the entire quantity based on the balance of the accumulator.
• Prospective tiers are used if your usage volumes are cyclical in nature (higher in specific months of the calendar year and low in the other months). In such scenarios, you can choose to use the volume from the higher months and either average or annualize that volume before you use that in your tier evaluation.
• Prospective tiers are also more common for Partners, Resellers which may offer additional value-add services on top of what is managed with Aria platform. In such cases, they may be interested in knowing the future pricing rates, to add a mark-up on top of the Aria prices which is based on prospective volume.
• Aria allows configuration of parameters that help structure your prospective tier pricing. These attributes are:
  • Evaluation Start—This is a Month of the year value which determines the start month from which to accumulate volume. If for a deployment we want a fixed calendar month quarter starting from the 1st month, then we can set this value to 1.
  • Evaluation End—This is a Month of the year value which determines the end month up to which to accumulate volume. Note that the Evaluation end can be less than evaluation start (for e.g., Evaluation start time of 10 and Evaluation End of 4  This would mean that we are accumulating for a 6-month period starting from October 1st 00:00:00 to April 1st 00:00:00).
  • Offset Months—This is the offset number of months after which the Pricing term is effective. This works for Resellers who may add a markup on top of the tiered price to their customers. The offset month provides the buffer period to set up the markup on top of the pricing term tier price.
• you to have a notification period where the next tier pricing can be made available to the partners and resellers who can revise and add mark-ups against the Aria pricing.
• Next Pricing Term This determines the duration in number of months for which the next pricing term is effective. You need to make sure that all the 365 days of the year are covered from the pricing term point of view. You can also have rolling prospective tiers (for e.g., last 3 months volume, determines the pricing for next 3 months and this rolls on forward. In such an example, it is important to note that while the balance reference from the evaluation period is used, we are also accumulating for the NEXT evaluation term).
• Volume Treatment—This allows user the choice of what needs to be done with the aggregate value before rating. The pricing admin might set the pricing tier ranges based on annualized volume or average monthly volume or actual volume. Those are the options for the Volume treatment.
  • ANNUALIZE—Convert the aggregate value to an annual volume. For example, if aggregate value for 3-month evaluation term is 9,000 then annualize will calculate the value to be 9,000 * 12 / 3 = 36,000). The resulting value is then used to determine the tiers.
  • AVERAGE—Convert the aggregate value to a monthly average volume. For example, if aggregate value for 3-month evaluation-term is 9,000 then average will calculate the value to be 9,000 / 3 = 3,000). The resulting value is then used to determine the tiers.
  • AS-IS—Use the aggregate value as is for rating.

Quantity Tiers

• Quantity Tiers are based on the input quantity of the usage record and always start at 0 for each usage record.
• For example, if you download a large file of data (9GB), then your tier pricing can be set up where for the 1-5 GB, you charge X1 value per GB and from 5-10 GB, you charge X2 value per GB.

Balance Based Tiers

• Balance Based Tiers are based on the balance of an accumulator resource.
• Rating will pick the balance of the accumulator based on the tier type and the time of the transaction and then use the accumulator value to determine what tiers to apply.

Tier Ranges With Allegro

Tier range starts of ‘min quantity’ to ‘max quantity’ in Allegro follows the following characteristics.

• The first tier with ‘Minimum Quantity’ always starts at 0.
• The last tier with ‘Maximum Quantity’ should always be empty or 0.
• The Minimum Quantity of a tier is inclusive (>=)
• The Maximum Quantity of a tier is exclusive (<)

Allowances and Accumulators

When setting up rates for the pricing model, Allegro allows for consuming allowance resources and using accumulators as well.

Within a subscription (balance group) for each master plan instance, different usage-types can share the same allowance. This provides the sharing of allowances within a master plan instance. It is important to note that there is no limit on the type of allowances consumed. As long as there is charged to offset, more than one allowance can be consumed. In other words, if the rating impact of the transaction is $20, then $20 worth of one or more allowances can be consumed. When an allowance is consumed, monetized usage keeps track of the allowance consumed and also offsets the COST of the transaction for the allowance consumed. 

Similarly, the same usage can accumulate to one or more accumulator resources too. For example, for the same usage record, we can aggregate both the quantity and amount in the respective accumulators. 

Billing Reference Price

The Aria Allegro catalog allows Activation and Recurring services to be augmented with “Allowances” and/or “Accumulators” in Aria Allegro. For such scenarios, the pricing admin may need a reference of the pricing setup in core Aria to determine how much of allowance to provide for the one-time or recurring service. This can be found in the price plan details under the ‘Billing reference price’ attribute.

Volume Rating

Volume Rating is a special flavor of Prospective Tier pricing. For some verticals, some clients require that all usage records are to be rated using the same tier after determining the tier that should apply based on the total volume of the usage records during the usage invoicing cycle.

This, in Aria Allegro, is achieved with ‘Volume Rating’ indicator. If the pricing model selected by the user is ‘Tiered’ only, then the Volume Rating attribute is enabled for the user selection. When the ‘Volume Rating’ flag is enabled for a price-plan and if that price-plan is used during the rating process, then Aria Allegro will perform two pass processing.

1. In the 1st pass, as the usage is ingested, it accumulates the total quantity of all the usage records
2. In the 2nd pass, as part of the end of day job schedule processing, all the usages are picked up again, the accumulator value from the first pass is looked at and a fixed tier based on the accumulator value is applied to each and every usage record.

User should make sure that the Tier Accumulator reference and the accumulator impact are set up correctly in the price plan.

Customer Attribute-based Model

• As the name suggests, the pricing model is based on the combination of customer attributes and their values.
• Example of customer attributes that can be considered for customer attribute-based pricing is:
  • Account Type—It identifies the type of account. The possible values are Direct Customer, Partner, Reseller, Value-added partner and more
  • Account Sub Type—This can identify the categorization of accounts as Platinum, Gold, Silver or Green, Yellow and Red.
  • Market Segment—The attribute identifies if it is a B2C customer or a small, medium or large enterprise.
  • Sales Channel—The attribute identifies the sales channel through which the account was onboarded. This could be CSR, Self-Service, eCommerce and more.
  • Geography—The city, state, postal-code and country attributes may determine the price.
  • And more…

Transaction Attribute-based Model

• As the name suggests, the pricing model is based on the transaction attributes. 
• The transaction attributes are derived attributes for the usage record. 
• These transaction attributes can be combination or time-model, zone-model, rate-unit and more.

Usage Attribute-based Model

• As the name suggests, the pricing model is based on the combination of raw attributes from the usage record. 
• A few usage record attributes and their value combinations can be put in a single monetization plan.
• Allegro allows creation of many such models for the same service that are based on different combinations of usage attributes.

Composite Model

• As the name suggests, the composite model allows you to combine one or more models into a unique “Create your own” models.
• A composite model can be a combination of two or more combinations of Tiered models (any type of tier structures), customer attribute-based model, transaction attribute-based model, usage attribute-based model.