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The latest from the World of Zuora

Press Releases

Zuora’s April ’13 Release Introduces REST APIs and Enhanced Quote Configuration Capabilities

Latest release speeds and simplifies subscription commerce processes, includes REST based commerce APIs as well as enhancements to Z-Force quote templates.

Redwood City, CA – April 12, 2013

Summary

Zuora, the leader in subscription commerce, billing and finance, today announced the immediate availability of its April 2013 product release. Zuora continued its momentum in 2013 by incorporating REST based APIs for rapid web storefront deployments, and further strengthening Z-Force, Zuora’s native salesforce.com quoting application.

REST APIs for Simplified and Accelerated Subscription Commerce

Zuora has always maintained robust SOAP based APIs to enable online subscription commerce. This month, Zuora is unveiling new REST based APIs that make it faster and more intuitive for customers to integrate subscription commerce onto their websites. In addition to REST APIs, Zuora is also including the following tools to help customers accelerate web storefront deployments:

Ruby and Java SDK libraries
JSON cURL samples
API test tool

Additional Enhancements to Z-Force Quote Templates

Salesforce continues to be the primary channel for assisted sales amongst the Zuora customer base. This month Zuora is increasing configuration options for Z-Quotes, Zuora’s native salesforce.com quoting application. Highlights of the new configuration options include:

Additional account, product and opportunity-level merge fields. Customers can include significantly more detailed information on quotes.
Ability to go beyond standard fields and include custom fields from Accounts, Opportunities, Quotes, and their related objects into quotes

Commentary

“REST has quickly become the de facto protocol for web APIs,” said Ned Bryant, VP Application Development at FireHost. “It’s great to partner with a company like Zuora that is not just a leader in cloud billing, but also recognizes this trend and has responded to it. We’ve used many aspects of Zuora’s APIs, and the new REST APIs now give us a simpler and faster way to connect Zuora to our online commerce experience and business intelligence engine.”
“In today’s online commerce world, it is critical for subscription businesses to give customers greater visibility and control over their subscriptions,” said Ruslan Bondariev, CTO at SMTP.com. “Our business depends on easy to use and efficient platforms such as Zuora’s to drive our online business, and the latest release of REST APIs makes it very simple for us to rapidly deploy self service and account management capabilities on our website.”
“Zuora’s latest release accelerates online storefront deployments, providing faster time-to-market capabilities to our customers that need to enable online self service commerce,” said Marc Aronson, SVP of Engineering at Zuora. “Zuora is committed to directly delivering product innovation to customers according to their business needs. These new RESTI APIs and quote configuration capabilities further strengthen Zuora’s leadership in the area of subscription commerce.”

About Zuora, Inc.

Zuora is the global leader in Relationship Business Management solutions. Zuora delivers the subscription billing, commerce and finance capabilities that have become the industry standard to help companies transition to the Subscription Economy. Enterprises and emerging companies alike use Zuora’s multi-tenant cloud solution to enable growth strategies, to streamline key processes and to provide visibility into the metrics that matter most in the Subscription Economy. Zuora services innovative customers like Informatica, Box.net, DocuSign, Firehost, Xplornet, Ustream and Reed Business Information. To learn more about Zuora, please visit www.zuora.com.

October 10, 2014

Zuora Turns 50 as the Subscription Economy Comes of Age

Rapid Innovation is the Engine Behind the Unstoppable Momentum of Industry Shift to Subscriptions

Redwood City, CA – May 22, 2013

News

Zuora, the leader in commerce, billing and finance for the Subscription Economy, today announced the 50th product release since the company’s founding just over five years ago.
Zuora’s innovation engine, coupled with the company’s unwavering commitment to help companies successfully transition to the Subscription Economy, has been the force behind the company’s momentum and growth.
Zuora has seen over $15 billion in contracted subscription revenue and has more than doubled its customer base in less than 18 months.

Multiple Billion Dollar Industries Have Undergone Massive Business Model Changes

In the last five years, the emergence of subscription-based business models has caused a major transformation across multiple multi-billion dollar industries. This massive shift is having a disruptive and profound impact on companies across a wide-range of sectors, including media, technology, consumer retail, telecommunications, financial services and healthcare services, to name a few.

Examples include:

Media: In the shift to digital, media companies are discovering that they can offset precipitous declines in advertising revenue by finding new ways to monetize subscriber relationships. In fact, 47% of the newspapers at the top 10 US publishers are now charging for content.
Technology: In response to market demand, software and hardware companies alike are racing to reinvent their offerings in the cloud, creating the need to offer pay-as-you-go subscription models in order to compete. According to Forrester Research, the global public cloud market will grow to $116B by 2016, largely driven by SaaS (software-as-a-service).
Device Manufacturers: In a world of connected devices, companies like Lytx and BI Incorporated have moved their business models away from selling low-margin hardware (one unit at a time) to subscription services that enable a predictable, high-margin recurring revenue stream.
Retail: The rise of subscription commerce for anything from clothes to toys to personal care products is upending the traditional retailer / consumer model. Businesses such as Shoedazzle and Dollar Shave Club have discovered the benefits of an ongoing subscription relationship and the delivery of a more personalized level of service based on customer insights gathered over time.
Telecommunications: Traditional telephone and cable companies have discovered that the next phase of their growth lies in “over the top” services, a move that puts them squarely in competition with companies like Netflix, Apple, and Google, demanding a level of agility and flexibility that their century old billing systems cannot support.

In each of these industries, businesses have found that the basis of competition is shifting from those which are able to ship the most units of a product, to those who are able to build the deepest customer relationships and from a focus on gross margins, to a focus on pricing and packaging to meet the needs of the widest set of customers.

In order to support this transformation, companies in each of these industries are looking beyond traditional, manufacturing-centric ERP systems to a new breed of applications that deliver a broad set of commerce, billing and finance capabilities and which are purpose-built for a subscription business model.

50 Months of Innovation Fuels Market Momentum for Zuora

In just over five years, Zuora has acquired the largest customer base of leading Subscription Economy businesses across multiple industries. By translating the needs of this unique community into capabilities that drive success in the Subscription Economy, Zuora’s monthly innovation engine has been instrumental to the company’s rapid growth and momentum. Highlights of which include:

More than doubling its customer base in the last 18 months
A pace of nearly 50 customer go-lives per quarter
$15.5 billion in subscription-based revenue contracts
Growing customer list of brand name businesses across multiple industries, including the businesses quoted below and featured on Zuora’s customer website.
More than 12 customers with contracts in excess of $1MM each
8X increase in year-over-year processed invoice revenue in the last two years

Rapid Pace of Innovation Delivers High Value to Customers

In 50 short months, Zuora has delivered the world’s broadest set of capabilities to launch and grow a subscription business. Highlights of the portfolio include:

1. The most robust solution for subscription commerce, billing, and finance

Z-Billing – the first complete billing solution that allows businesses to price and package services any way they want, and rapidly bring those services to market;
Z-Force – a native Salesforce application that enables businesses to manage complex quoting for high value B2B subscription commerce;
Z-Commerce – with point-and-click web checkout pages enabling rapid online storefront deployments for scalable and secure B2C commerce;
Z-Finance – enabling finance teams to tame accounting close and revenue recognition processes without drowning in spreadsheets.

2. Open, configurable platform to achieve faster time-to-value

Pre-built integrations with 13 leading gateways and processors, allowing customers to process payments at scale, in 200 currencies across all major credit cards and nine direct debit payment methods;
Delivered REST APIs and pre-built code libraries for rapid integrations to 3rd party applications;
Real time access to the key metrics and reports relevant to the businesses in the Subscription Economy.

3. Enterprise-class security & compliance coupled with global, scalable delivery operations

Attained the highest levels of security and compliance standards (PCI Level 1, SSAE 16 Type II, and Safe Harbor);
Achieved more than 10x increase in capacity since Aug 2012 with a new datacenter launch ensuring that as the Subscription Economy grows, Zuora continues to scale to accommodate that growth;
Delivered 50-80% performance improvements across the platform in the last five months, allowing customers to generate bills rapidly and get paid as quickly as possible.

Zuora’s continued product innovation has enabled customers to launch and scale subscription revenue streams, efficiently manage complex subscription processes, and measure and monitor the right metrics to make timely and effective business decisions. For details of Zuora’s 50th product release click here.

Customer Commentary

Hundreds of customers have benefitted from Zuora’s unprecedented pace of innovation and rapid deployment of new product features:

“Emma, Inc. has been using Zuora Z-Business since 2009, and we’re continuously impressed by the product’s steady evolution,” said Patrick Block, Director of Financial Planning & Analysis at Emma, Inc. “Zuora empowered us to meet our difficult subscription management challenges, helping us grow as a business and meet the needs of our customers.”
“Zuora was a critical component in the quick launch of our cloud-based Point of Sale platform, NCR Silver,” said Bill Plummer, Business Enablement Officer, NCR. “The fact that we were able to deploy Zuora in just two months, and realize all the benefits of the product in such a short time is a testament Zuora’s commitment to the success of its customers. We congratulate the Zuora team on reaching this important milestone.”
“When we have a new idea for a marketing promotion, it takes just a few minutes to configure it in Zuora,” said Mike Puglia, VP Marketing at TimeTrade. “Last quarter we were able to leverage Zuora to create a promotion and put together a mass email marketing campaign that blasted out a promo code to everyone that had created a free Timetrade trial that quarter. We ended up closing over 200 new customers using the promo code without ever having to talk to engineering. That would have been impossible in another system.”
“Previously, our monthly billing process required the efforts of four full-time employees plus assistance from two others. With Z-Business from Zuora, two people handle the entire process, including invoicing, payment processing, dunning, refunds, and invoice adjustments,” said Ruslan Bondarev, CTO of SMTP.com. “We commend the Zuora engineering team on this huge accomplishment.”
“Z-Business from Zuora provides timely, accurate data that we can trust. This provides the information we need to really understand how to run all facets of our business, “ said Jim Franklin, CEO of SendGrid. “We congratulate the Zuora engineering team on its 50th product release.”
“Zuora’s flexibility and ease-of-use allowed us launch breakthrough reporting features and a new pricing model for our online employee training platform in record time, ” said Donna Wells, CEO at Mindflash. “We were able keep our developers 100% focused on enhancing our product because, with Zuora, we could shift our pricing plans virtually overnight with no engineering work required. As a result we launched the new value-added offering months earlier than we otherwise could have…and started capturing significantly higher revenue sooner as well.”
“We commend the Zuora engineering team on reaching this impressive milestone,” said Matthew Curl, Director, Revenue and Strategy for Five Stars, Inc.
“Congratulations to the Zuora engineering team on its 50th product release,” said Trevor Jones, VP Finance & Operations, Terapeak.

About Zuora, Inc.

Zuora is the global leader in Relationship Business Management (RBM) solutions. Zuora delivers the subscription commerce, billing and finance capabilities that have become the industry standard to help companies transition to the Subscription Economy. Enterprises and emerging companies alike use Zuora’s multi-tenant cloud solution to streamline key processes, provide visibility into the metrics that matter most and serve as the financial engine of the business. Zuora services innovative customers like Informatica, Tata Communications, Box, Zendesk, DocuSign, Xplornet, Ustream and Reed Business Information. To learn more about Zuora, please visit www.zuora.com, Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, join us on LinkedIn, hang out with us on Google+, or visit our blog, Z Blog.

October 10, 2014

Zuora’s June ‘13 Release Delivers Increased Visibility Into Data, Enhanced Reconciliation Reports

Latest release adds key insight into Zuora data from Salesforce, and new options for reconciliation reports.

Redwood City, CA – June 25, 2013

Summary

Zuora, the leader in subscription commerce, billing and finance, today announced the immediate availability of its June 2013 product release. Zuora continues product momentum this month by delivering increased visibility into data for use with Salesforce, enhanced accounts receivable reconciliation reports and support for non-referenced refunds for Merchant e-Solutions.

Additional Fields Synchronized On Accounts And Subscription Lists In Salesforce

Zuora customers who use the Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) platform value the visibility Zuora provides into account and subscription data directly in Salesforce. Based on customer feedback, Zuora continues to expand the level of data available to front-office teams who use Salesforce. This month, additions include more account and subscription fields to the Zuora Z-360 Salesforce sync. Customers can also configure which of these fields they want to display on pages within Salesforce, based on appropriate user roles and permissions.

Enhanced Accounting System Reconciliation

Zuora provides finance teams with accounts receivable aging reports to streamline their accounting reconciliation processes at the end of each month. This month, Zuora is enhancing aging balance reports to include optional aging on negative invoices for those customers who use Zuora’s negative invoice feature.

Non-Referenced Refunds For Merchant e-Solutions

Zuora continues its drumbeat of rolling out support for non-referenced (credit balance) refunds for additional pre-integrated gateways. After rolling out support for non-referenced refunds with Litle in May 2013, this month Zuora is rolling out support for non-referenced refunds with Merchant E-Solutions. Now, businesses using these gateways can refund account credits electronically to their customers from within the Zuora application.
All of Zuora’s hundreds of customers automatically receive this product update with no negative impact to existing configurations and customizations. This is only possible with the modern, multi-tenant SaaS architecture found in Zuora’sZ-Business platform. Customers can read about the details of the Jun ‘13 release here.

Commentary

“Z-Finance is a crucial component of Zuora that we rely on to help close our books faster. Our business has benefited from the revenue recognition and aging balance reports that Zuora provides. We are happy to see that Zuora continues to innovate in this area with the latest addition of optionally adding negative invoices to invoice aging reports” said Edward, St. Onge, President. Global Sales & Marketing at Flip.to. “Zuora helps us to manage our accounting close process, making it more efficient than before.”
“Zuora’s latest release speeds and simplifies what were previously complex commerce, billing and finance processes,” said Marc Aronson, SVP of Engineering at Zuora. “Zuora is committed to directly delivering these key product upgrades to our valued customers according to their business needs. These new insights and abilities in the June 2013 release will further strengthen Zuora’s leadership and empower its customers to transition into the Subscription Economy.”

About Zuora, Inc.

October 10, 2014

Zuora’s July ‘13 Release Delivers Deeper Accounting Alignment, Simplifies Customer Acquisition and Speeds Cash Collections

Latest release introduces a new chart of accounts feature, more quoting configurability, and further international payment support

Foster City, CA – July 29, 2013

Summary

Zuora, the leader in subscription commerce, billing and finance, today announced the immediate availability of its July 2013 product release. Zuora continues its commitment to continuous innovation through regular feature releases this month by introducing a new chart of accounts structure, more out-of-box quoting capabilities, better quoting configurability, and broader payment options for merchants in Canada, Great Britain and Europe.

Highlights of the July 2013 release include:

New Chart of Accounts Structure

Zuora has always been complementary to a customer’s accounting system. With this latest release, Zuora introduces a new structure for customers to define chart of accounts in Zuora to match the structure in their accounting application. This deeper alignment eases the reconciliation process between Zuora and accounting applications.

Error-Free Accounting Code Mapping

Customers are now able to select from a pre-defined list of enumerated accounting codes on screens such as product creation and invoice adjustment screens. This will reduce errors and resolve common reconciliation challenges that customers face when these codes are incorrectly assigned.

Improved Quoting Flow for Accelerated Cash Collections

This month, Zuora introduces the ability to securely capture electronic payment details such as credit card information during the quoting process. This eliminates the added operational steps of contacting a customer post-sale for payment information, ultimately resulting in faster cash collections.

Faster, Easier Quote Configurability

In the B2B world, it is critical for customers to be able to tailor their sales quoting processes to match the needs of unique sales operational flows. This month, Zuora has delivered a number of enhancements that make it easier for customers to add or remove fields, rearrange page sections, change lists and tables, control page layouts by leveraging reusable components and with just a few clicks.

Initiating Cancellations from salesforce.com

Zuora has always provided customers the ability to initiate new sales, add-ons, upgrades, downgrades and renewals directly from salesforce.com. This month, customers now have the ability to submit subscription cancellations directly from salesforce.com. This allows front office personnel to save time by managing the subscription lifecycle from beginning to end, without logging into multiple systems.

Authorize.net Expands to Canada, U.K., Europe

Zuora’s strong partnerships with leading payment gateways ensures that customers can take advantage of gateway enhancements when they become available, without additional development effort. Authorize.net recently began supporting payments in Canada, Great Britain and Europe, which has been incorporated into the existing Authorize.net-Zuora integration. Any Zuora customers located in these countries can now leverage Authorize.net as their payment gateway of choice.

Each of Zuora’s hundreds of customers automatically receive this product update with no negative impact to existing configurations and customizations. This is only possible with the modern, multi-tenant SaaS architecture found in Zuora’s Z-Business platform. Customers can read about the details of the July ‘13 release here.

Commentary

“We welcome the new chart of accounts feature in Zuora’s July ’13 release. Having robust chart of functionality will help provide the foundation that makes is easier for Rightscale to align Zuora data with our accounting application. We look forward to Zuora’s continued innovation in this area.” said Kevin Spinelli, Director, Finance and Administration at RightScale.”
“Zuora is always thinking about how its customers can run their businesses more efficiently and deliver a commerce experience that closely aligns with their needs. As part of the July 2013 release, we can now collect customer payment details as part of our salesforce quoting process. This means that at DotLoop, we can begin processing a payment the instant that one of our prospects accepts a quote and becomes a customer,” said Dustin Abney, Director of Customer Experience.
“With this latest release, the Zuora team wanted to focus on deeper integration with our customers’ existing systems to further ease the payment and reconciliation processes,” said Marc Aronson, SVP of Engineering at Zuora. “As more and more businesses are evolving into the Subscription Economy, Zuora wants to ensure that any company can quickly and easily deploy a subscription-based billing system that meets their business and customers needs.”

About Zuora, Inc.

October 10, 2014

Zuora’s August ’13 Release Delivers Blazing Performance Scalability to Z-Force

Latest release delights customers with drastic performance gains that provide faster visibility to key subscriber data in salesforce.com

Foster City, CA – August 29, 2013

Summary

Zuora, the leader in subscription commerce, billing and finance, today announced the immediate availability of its August 2013 product release. Zuora continues its commitment to continuous innovation not only on feature set, but also on core platform scalability. The addition of Turbo Sync technology to Z-Force for Salesforce will give customers access to key subscriber data faster than ever before.
Highlights of the August 2013 release include:

Z-Force Turbo Sync

In the age of high-speed, internet-scale business, delivering on performance and scalability is often just as important (if not more important) than increasing innovative functionality.

Zuora has pioneered key executive dashboards and subscriber reports for salesforce.com users by making subscription, billing and payment data available directly in Salesforce. Now, accessing those insights is easier than ever before.

This month, Zuora customers using Z-Force will experience the benefits of Zuora’s latest scalability and performance innovation: Z-Force Turbo Sync. Turbo Sync provides dramatic speed improvements to customers with large volumes of data synced between Zuora and Salesforce. With Turbo Sync enabled, customers will experience up to a 20-50x improvement in sync performance.

All of Zuora’s hundreds of customers automatically received this product update with no negative impact to existing configurations and customizations. This is only possible with the modern, multi-tenant SaaS architecture found in Zuora’s comprehensive Z-Business platform. Additional

details of the Aug ‘13 are here.

Commentary

“It is crucial to our business that we keep large volumes of data in sync between Zuora and Salesforce, giving our front office staff complete visibility into key subscriber data and metrics within Salesforce. With the release of Z-Force Turbo Sync, we’ve seen our sync times drop from 5 hours to 5 minutes. This is a significant gain for TripAdvisor and a clear indication that Zuora is committed to delivering enterprise-grade scalability and performance.”

– Steve Moran, Sr, Director of Operations, TripAdvisor

About Zuora, Inc.

October 10, 2014

Zuora Raises $50 Million to Bring Every Company into the Subscription Economy

Next World Capital, Northgate Capital and Vulcan Capital Join Existing Investors in Series E Round

Foster City, CA – September 5, 2013 – Zuora, the subscription commerce, billing and finance leader, today announced that it has raised $50 million in additional capital to expand operations and help transform the quickly growing number of companies that are embracing the Subscription Economy.

This Series E round includes new investors Next World Capital, Vulcan Capital, and Northgate Capital;
Each existing major investor participated in this round, including: Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Tenaya Capital, Workday founder and co-CEO Dave Duffield and Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com;
Abhishek Agrawal of Vulcan Capital and Craig Hanson of Next World Capital to join the board of directors;
This brings the total amount of capital raised to-date to $132.5 million.

LIMITLESS OPPORTUNITIES IN A WORLD SUBSCRIBED

Since its founding in 2007, Zuora has emerged as one of the world’s fastest growing software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies – part of an ecosystem that has challenged Oracle, SAP and other legacy technology vendors. The recent shift in the industry to the cloud has created new opportunities for a range of innovative companies that have reinvented antiquated business functions and brought them into the 21st century. By one estimate from Canaccord Genuity, $100 billion of new value will be created over the next five years by disruptive companies that have yet to go IPO.

This move to the cloud has created new business models. Five years ago, Zuora predicted that a fundamental shift will take place – away from a product-based “buy once” economy to one based on recurring subscriptions – and created an entirely new approach to the core systems that optimize this business model. Subscriptions are becoming increasingly popular with end-users and the Subscription Economy has reached an inflection point, where billion-dollar industries as diverse as retail, technology, media, telecommunications, healthcare, education and financial services have each been disrupted by new subscription-based business models.

This investment demonstrates continued belief in the momentum of the Subscription Economy and the massive opportunity that lies ahead.

INNOVATION AND EXPANSION FOR THE SUBSCRIPTION ECONOMY

By inventing a simple and easy-to-use solution for subscription commerce, billing and finance, Zuora has given companies a way to implement new pay-as-you-go pricing models, open new revenue streams and gain competitive advantage. Zuora customers are looking beyond inefficient, manufacturing-centric ERP systems to more modern applications that deliver a broad set of commerce, billing and finance capabilities and are purpose-built for contemporary subscription business models.

For Zuora, the investment represents an opportunity to add to the company’s momentum and expand into new vertical markets and geographies. It will also contribute to additional investment in core research and development that will broaden and deepen its product line at an unparalleled pace.

In less than six years, Zuora has become one of the fastest growing enterprise software companies and the business continues to grow at a record-setting pace. This year alone, Zuora increased subscription revenue by approximately 90 percent year over year and grew its customer base by 55 percent in the last 18 months. In the past two years, Zuora has seen a seven times increase in invoice volume, and has signed over 20 contracts for $1 million plus to-date – including one of the world’s largest media companies and industry leaders in education, travel services, consumer packaged goods, cloud services, and telecommunications.

Zuora has signed up a host of customers across a wide range of industries in the past two years that have embraced subscription business models. Top names include: Appneta, Borderfree, BoxHop, Carfax, Dell, Docusign, Dyn, Gigya, Google Wildfire, HasOffers, Illumina, Informatica, Joyent, MLSListings, Okta, Rightscale, SendGrid, Symbility Solutions, SMTP.com, Timetrade, UniversityNow, Versature, and Zendesk.

Two new investment firms join the board, adding a broad set of industry experience:

Next World Capital, an international, expansion-stage venture capital firm headquartered in San Francisco and with a strong presence in Europe. NWC brings strong expertise in the SaaS industry, and its investment portfolio includes other players in this fast-growing technology sector, such as GoodData and Host Analytics. In addition to the investment and board seat, Zuora can now tap NWC’s unique European Advisor Network, and NWC will provide strategic market guidance, from account targeting to go-to-market strategy, as the company expands into additional verticals and new European markets.
Vulcan Capital is the private investment group that oversees Paul G. Allen’s multi-billion dollar portfolio. This investment was made from Vulcan’s new Silicon Valley based growth equity fund which is focused on investing behind the world’s brightest ideas and companies in the internet and technology space that are making a transformational change in the way that Zuora is pioneering the shift to subscriptions.

ZUORA HOSTS WORLD’S LARGEST CONFERENCE FOR THE SUBSCRIPTION ECONOMY

In response to the massive shift of companies to the Subscription Economy, Zuora will be hosting Subscribed 2013, the 2nd annual industry conference. Subscribed 2013 is the only global conference series designed specifically for the Subscription Economy and will feature keynotes and breakouts on best practices, business process and revenue growth strategies, and tips on how to use subscription metrics to drive better business decisions. Events will be held in San Francisco (September 19-20), London (October 1) and Sydney (October 24). To register for Subscribed, visit: https://www.subscribed.com

COMMENTARY

“The world is subscribing like never before, forcing companies to react to changing business models or risk becoming obsolete. The systems and processes that supported traditional business models just can’t keep up with the demands of the Subscription Economy. That’s why more and more companies turn to Zuora to run their subscription businesses,” said Zuora co-founder and CEO Tien Tzuo.
“Zuora has emerged as the clear leader in powering subscription-based business models worldwide; over the past 6 years the Company’s disruptive platform has become the industry standard for subscription billing, commerce and finance for both new high-growth companies as well as established companies that are launching new business lines based on the subscription model. Zuora has a tremendous opportunity to grow with its stellar set of clients who are themselves creating systemic change in various industries,” said Abhishek Agrawal, Managing Director of Vulcan Capital.
“Next World Capital focuses on strategically identifying those leadership companies that are pioneering or transforming markets, and Zuora is clearly at the forefront of powering the massive, long-term shift toward subscription models as the best way to sell many products and services, ” said Craig Hanson, partner, NWC. “We’re looking forward to leveraging our deep experience in SaaS software and NWC’s unmatched international platform to help Zuora expand into new markets globally.”
“Watching what Zuora and team have done over the past six years has been exciting and the opportunities that lie ahead massive. We believe in their mission and vision and look forward to supporting the company along its journey,” said Peter Fenton, General Partner, Benchmark Capital.
“We were early believers in Zuora and continue to be impressed with the continued execution of innovation demonstrated by the team,” said Tim Haley, Partner, Redpoint Ventures. “It’s exciting to see people subscribe to Netflix rather than rent movies and take Zip Cars instead of taxi cabs. The world has changed, and it’s obvious that we’ve reached the tipping point of what Zuora has been talking about for more than half a decade.”
“There is an undeniable shift in consumer buying behavior, where people want the option to subscribe to products and services, as opposed to physically owning things. This represents a massive opportunity for businesses to have the ability to build ongoing relationships with customers and easily offer additional services that will generate additional revenue streams. Zuora is the leader in subscription models and we are pleased to work with them to help transform the marketplace,” said Jason Pressman, Managing Director, Shasta Ventures.
“We believe that subscription businesses are the wave of the future. We are delighted to further our investment in Zuora which has been enabling this new business model across industries and geographies,” said Mike Volpi, Partner at Index Ventures.
“The shift toward subscription business models has driven many companies to adopt new pricing models and technology strategies in order to meet changing customer demands,” said Amy Konary, Research Vice President at IDC. “Zuora is helping to enable many industry-leading companies to support these models. The additional funding should enable Zuora to further capitalize on this massive shift and extend its leadership in bringing more innovation to the market that will accelerate its adoption.”

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

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About Zuora, Inc.

Zuora is the global leader in subscription commerce and billing, helping companies in every industry transition to the Subscription Economy. Enterprise leaders and high-growth companies alike use Zuora’s multi-tenant cloud platform to launch, scale, and monetize their subscription services. Zuora’s applications work where traditional ERP applications fail: Subscription pricing, quoting, orders, billing, payments, and renewals. Built from the ground up by SaaS industry veterans from salesforce.com, PayPal, and Netsuite, Zuora services innovative customers like Informatica, Tata Communications, Box, Xplornet, Ustream and Reed Business Information. To learn more about Zuora, please visit www.zuora.com.

About Next World Capital

Next World Capital (NWC) is an international, expansion-stage venture capital firm that invests in leading software, mobile and Internet companies. With $200 million of assets under management, NWC is affiliated with the large global investment firm Next World Group, which provides an extraordinary international platform for its portfolio companies. The firm offers strategic insight and in-depth sector acumen to help its portfolio companies grow into market leaders. Furthermore, NWC uniquely operates a European Expansion Program with top executives across the continent to accelerate the growth of its portfolio companies through a large network of partners, channels and direct customers. NWC is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Paris and Brussels. https://nextworldcap.com/

About Vulcan Capital

Vulcan Capital is the multi-billion dollar investment arm of Vulcan Inc., the company founded by Paul G. Allen to manage his philanthropic and business endeavors. The firm invests across all stages of corporate development including venture capital, growth equity and leveraged buyouts as well as investing in public equities and other liquid asset classes. Vulcan Capital’s current portfolio spans a range of industry sectors, including technology, internet, mobile, life sciences, energy and natural resources, media and communications, and financial and information services. This investment was made from Vulcan’s new Silicon Valley based growth equity fund which is focused on making investments ranging from $10-$100 million into leading internet and technology companies, including mid- to late-stage venture capital, recaps, growth buyouts and strategic public market block investments. For more information, visit capital.vulcan.com

About Northgate Capital

Northgate Capital, LLC is a premier provider of alternative asset investments through fund-of-funds vehicles and direct investment vehicles. With more than $3 billion in committed capital, Northgate’s foremost objective is to be an integral partner to institutions and families by helping them earn consistently top-quartile returns from their alternative asset investments. Northgate’s portfolio funds are often oversubscribed, making participation extremely limited. For more information, visit www.northgate.com.

October 10, 2014

Former Oracle and SAP Executive Joins Zuora as Senior Vice President

Keith Costello Takes Helm of Global Services

Foster City, CA – September 12, 2013

Zuora, the leader in subscription commerce, billing and finance, today announced the continued expansion of its executive management team with the addition of Keith Costello, who will join as Zuora’s Senior Vice President of Global Services. An enterprise technology executive with twenty-five years of experience, Costello previously served in senior executive roles at Oracle, Siebel Systems, and at SAP. Guillaume Vives, who previously held the position of Senior Vice President of Professional Services, has been named Senior Vice President of Strategy and Product Management.

Prior to working at Zuora, Keith Costello was with SAP, where he held a variety of senior leadership positions, including Executive Vice President and General Manager in SAP’s business analytics and global services divisions. At Siebel Systems, Costello served as Group Vice President of Global Services, and at Oracle as Vice President of Oracle Consulting.

Earlier in Costello’s career he also worked for blue chip consulting firms Price Waterhouse and Booz, Allen & Hamilton. He currently is on the advisory board of brandadvisors, LLC, and is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley.

For the last two years, Guillaume Vives has driven implementation of Zuora’s award-winning platform for its growing customer base, increasing Zuora’s go-live cadence to nearly 50 deals per quarter. As Senior Vice President of Product Strategy and Product Management, Guillaume Vives will lead Zuora’s world-class product team to deliver platform updates, partner integrations and a simplified and accelerated user experience.

“This is a critical moment in the company’s growth,” said Keith Costello, Senior Vice President of Global Services. “Zuora is quickly signing customers, unveiling innovative new products and cementing partnerships with some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names. I’m proud to be driving the effort to maximize Zuora’s growth and ensure the company is ready to shepherd businesses into the Subscription Economy.”

“At Zuora, our mission is to build the market-leading application businesses depend on as they transition to the Subscription Economy. What Oracle and SAP are for manufacturing companies, we are committed to being for subscription businesses,” said Tien Tzuo, CEO, Zuora. “With the addition of Keith, we are adding a leader with unmatched experience and knowledge to help Zuora and its customers drive success in the Subscription Economy.”

About Zuora, Inc.

Zuora is the global leader in subscription commerce and billing, helping companies in every industry transition to the Subscription Economy. Enterprise leaders and high-growth companies alike use Zuora’s multi-tenant cloud platform to launch, scale, and monetize their subscription services. Zuora’s applications work where traditional ERP applications fail: Subscription pricing, quoting, orders, billing, payments, and renewals. Built from the ground up by SaaS industry veterans from salesforce.com, PayPal, and Netsuite, Zuora services innovative customers like Informatica, Tata Communications, Box, Xplornet, Ustream and Reed Business Information. Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, join us on LinkedIn, hang out with us on Google+, or visit Z Blog. To learn more about Zuora, please visit www.zuora.com.

October 10, 2014

Zuora Accelerates ANZ Regional Expansion with Senior SaaS Business Executive Appointment

Sydney, xx August 2013 – Zuora, the leader in subscription commerce, billing and finance, today announced the appointment of Greg Cullen as Vice President of Sales for Australia and New Zealand.

Based in Sydney, Cullen will be responsible for accelerating Zuora’s presence across Australia and New Zealand, focusing on business development and revenue growth, as well as reinforcing Zuora’s position at the heart of the Subscription Economy.

Cullen brings more than 20 years of experience in global and regional sales management to Zuora having previously established enterprise and channel sales strategies in Australia, New Zealand and across Asia and the UK.

He joins Zuora from ServiceNow, a leading provider of SaaS services that automates enterprise IT operations. While at ServiceNow, Cullen was Sales Director for Australia and New Zealand where he was responsible for fuelling explosive growth for the organisation among leading private sector enterprises.

Cullen was also Regional Director/Channel Director for PlateSpin prior to its acquisition by Novell and has held channel and sales management positions at Trend Micro, Toshiba, Tech Pacific and Microsoft

“All over the world, we’ve seen the emergence of subscription-based business models causing a major transformation in business operations for both startups and multiple multi-billion dollar industries — and Australia is no exception. Since our international expansion, Zuora has benefited from the momentum in demand for subscription models and tripled its customer base in Australia and New Zealand as enterprise and emerging companies look to take advantage of the evolving Subscription Economy,” says Tien Tzuo, CEO, Zuora.

Cullen replaces John Ruthven who has been promoted to Senior Vice President of Strategy with a focus on Zuora’s international growth. Ruthven has more than 20 years of commercial IT experience, spanning regional and global roles in APAC, EMEA and emerging markets.

“Greg is an established leader with a track record of successfully working with customers to support their transformation. His skills in developing strategies to increase sales momentum coupled with his business consulting expertise will provide the skills and experience required to capitalise on the momentum within the subscription economy to exponentially grow sales. He is a great addition to our leadership team,” says Ruthven.

October 10, 2014

The Subscription Manifesto is Unveiled: World’s First Framework for Global Success in the $500 Billion Subscription Economy

Over 75 Business Leaders from Around the World Endorse a New Way to Build Better Businesses through Subscriptions

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – September 19, 2013

Zuora, the subscription commerce, billing and finance leader, today announced that over 75 business leaders joined together in a new manifesto to declare that there is a better way of building a business through subscriptions. The Subscription Manifesto was unveiled at Zuora’s annual Subscribed 2013 event in San Francisco, the only event dedicated to success in the Subscription Economy.

A Better Way to Build a Business and the $500 Billion Opportunity

There has been undeniable shift in the marketplace, as people and companies alike are subscribing more and more to services – and not buying physical products – to meet their everyday needs. Part of a larger Subscription Economy, this change in market demand, along with the benefits of a predictable revenue stream, has attracted businesses from across industries each looking for a way to build a better business. Examples include:

Media: Media companies, like Fairfax Media, New York Times, and News UK, are reinventing themselves in today’s digital age through strategies such as broadening their geographical reach, offering cross content bundling, delivering multi-device experiences, and providing creative pricing.
Technology: In response to market demand, software companies like HP and Adobe have been forced to embrace the pay-as-you-go subscription models set forth by Salesforce and Amazon in order to compete;
Device Manufacturers: In a world of connected devices, companies like NCR, Lytx and BI Incorporated have shifted their business model to sell subscription services tethered to devices, enabling a more predictable, high margin recurring revenue stream.
Retail: Shoedazzle, Dollar Shave Club and others have discovered the benefits of an ongoing subscription relationship and the delivery of a more personalized level of service based on customer insights gathered over time;
Telecommunications: Traditional telecom and cable companies have discovered that the next phase of their growth lies in growing revenues from their subscriber base by providing flexible, over-the-top services, a move that puts them squarely in competition with companies like Netflix, Apple, and Google;
Education: Education is going beyond the classroom and transforming everything into online services from courses to study guides to teacher assessment tools.
Financial Services: American Express, Advent Software, Ellie Mae and Smarsh deliver a broad array of subscription-based financial services, extending their brand to build stronger client relationships and expand into additional revenue streams.
Healthcare: As more health records are digitized, states roll out federally mandated insurance, and new medical devices improve preventive care, companies like Fitbit, CareCloud, Illumina and Voyant Health are quickly launching new services that disrupt the industry with innovative subscription business models.

According to recent studies, the market opportunity for subscription businesses is conservatively estimated at $500 billion. Leaders across industry analyst firms, top-tier companies and emerging disruptive companies believe this manifesto as a guide to business to success in the Subscription Economy. A full list of signatories can be found here. Tien Tzuo, CEO for Zuora, believes, “in five to ten years, every company will offer subscriptions. It’s good for the customer, good for the business, and good for society. There’s been a rallying cry from our customers and others in the industry for a better way to run their business and thrive in this half trillion dollar market opportunity.”

Industry Manifesto Lays Out the Path to Subscription Success

The groundbreaking Subscription Manifesto, signed by leaders of 75 companies committed to the establishment of a modern operating model, includes a set of core values and nine guiding principles for subscription businesses to adopt.

Through their collective learning and experiences, signatories of the manifesto have realized that in the Subscription Economy, traditional approaches to running a business do not ensure success. Instead, to be successful, they have come to believe that a business must focus on:

Deeper customer relationships versus one-time transactions;
Dynamic, value-based pricing versus fixed, cost-plus pricing;
Efficient, consumption-based services versus shipping unit after unit;
Predictable, forward-looking revenue versus backwards-looking financial reporting.

Until now, business leaders in the Subscription Economy have been charting their own course. The documented principles in this manifesto will serve as a guide to all leaders that are embracing the subscription model.

The underlining principles of the manifesto can be found here.

SUPPORTING COMMENTARY

“There is a better way to build a business today through subscription models that enable companies to offer customers that choice that they demand, bring more predictability into the business and generate additional, recurring revenue streams for the business,” said Tien Tzuo, CEO of Zuora. “Today we stand on the shoulders of giants in a global movement that supports this industry-wide transformation.”
“As businesses of all sizes move to the cloud, subscriptions are fast supplanting traditional licensing as the enterprise software business model of the future,” says Aaron Levie, CEO of Box. “This shift benefits vendors, who gain more elasticity and tighter alignment with customers. More importantly, the move to a subscription model frees customers from vendor lock-in, bringing more choice and innovation to the enterprise software landscape.”
“Like most in the media industry, we are undergoing massive transformation. Subscribers are a big focus for us as we rebalance our revenues,” said Andrew Lam-Po-Tang, CIO and CTO at Fairfax Media. “This manifesto provide a very useful template for driving subscription success.”
“Businesses with recurring revenue models across the globe are looking to better align their product and service offerings with the demands of their customers,” said Ben Kepes, Analyst and Principal at Diversity Limited. “Zuora has always been, and continues to be a visionary leading and educating companies about where the Subscription Economy is going. The Subscription Manifesto places a stake in the ground and sets the bar by which everyone in the industry will be measured.”
“As someone who has run operations in both the subscription and traditional models, I know how challenging it is in a subscription business,” said Bill Plummer, Business Enablement Officer at NCR Corporation. “I think a guide to help businesses based on real experience is a beneficial step for the growth of the Subscription Economy. I support this manifesto and call on other leaders to do the same.”
“The shift towards subscription business models is driving companies to build better ways to run their businesses. In this new world how you price, sell, bill, collect payments and account for your business is entirely different,” said Amy Konary, Research Vice President at IDC. “The community of businesses, analysts, and partners in the Subscription Economy have come together with Zuora to structure this framework of guiding principles to help every business become a successful subscription business.”
“We decided a few years ago that we needed a new model to drive our business,” said Charles Best, CFO of Blackline Systems. “In addition to moving to a SaaS-based revenue model, we also implemented a number of subscription-based Cloud technology tools internally to improve operating efficiencies. BlackLine’s success today is due in large part to this shift to the ‘Subscription Economy’. Businesses looking to thrive will do best by embracing the principles of this manifesto.”
“The subscription model is powerful and totally different from a traditional business model and I support the manifesto because it covers all the bases and is built on real experience,” said Andrew Pimentel, Head of Operations at Demandforce. “Every business in the Subscription Economy should embrace these principles if they want to be successful.”

About Zuora, Inc.

Zuora is the global leader in subscription commerce and billing, helping companies in every industry transition to the Subscription Economy. Enterprise leaders and high-growth companies alike use Zuora’s multi-tenant cloud platform to launch, scale, and monetize their subscription services. Zuora’s applications work where traditional ERP applications fail: Subscription pricing, quoting, orders, billing, payments, and renewals. Built from the ground up by SaaS industry veterans from salesforce.com, PayPal, and Netsuite, Zuora services innovative customers like Informatica, Tata Communications, Box.net, DocuSign, GigaOM, Xplornet, Ustream and Reed Business Information. To learn more about Zuora, please visit www.zuora.com

October 10, 2014

Zuora Accelerates Shift to Relationship Commerce with Latest Release of Z-Business

Subscription Economy Ushers in Age of Relationship Commerce, Rendering Legacy Commerce Applications Built Around the Shopping Cart to be Obsolete

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – September 19, 2013

Summary

Today at its annual Subscribed 2013 conference, Zuora, the subscription commerce, billing and finance leader, announced its latest release of the Z-Business platform. This release includes Z-Commerce NextGen, the next generation of Zuora’s Z-Commerce application, built upon a new foundation that powers relationship commerce in the Subscription Economy.
Since its invention in 1937, the shopping cart has remained a long-standing symbol of commerce around the world. Even digital e-commerce – which today represents 8% of all commerce – is centered on delivering a shopping cart experience online.
But, as more and more companies across different industries shift to a subscription business model, their success depends on building and nurturing customer relationships.
In this age of relationship commerce, the shopping cart experience does not meet the complex and changing needs of subscription companies, which now require new ways to build relationships built around consumption, time, and the dynamic nature of transactions.

Z-Commerce is a core part of Zuora’s Z-Business platform, the backbone of the most innovative subscription companies. Z-Business includes Z-Commerce, Z-Billing and Z-Finance.

Subscription Economy Ushers in Age of Relationship Commerce

For almost a hundred years, the shopping cart has been the defining symbol of modern commerce, serving as the tool used by consumers as they purchased things at physical stores. The rise of digital commerce over the past few decades simply took the shopping cart experience and recast it online. Buy once, check out and leave.

This paradigm is breaking as consumers are shifting more of their purchases to subscriptions. Unlike in a product economy – where the success and growth of a business depended upon producing and shipping more SKUs – in the Subscription Economy, the success and growth of a business depends upon building and nurturing valuable customer relationships through offering access to services. Subscription services offer businesses new dimensions upon which to build relationships that create value for the customer and value for the business, including:

Consumption: The ability to monetize levels of consumption so that consumers only pay for what they use.
Time: In the product economy, consumers owned products forever, whereas in the Subscription Economy, consumers want the opportunity to access services for varying lengths of time, depending upon their needs.
Change: In the product economy, a sale was the only kind of transaction possible. The Subscription Economy offers subscribers the ability to constantly change their subscriptions to suit their needs, resulting in additional kinds of transactions like add-ons, upgrades, downgrades, suspensions, renewals, and so on.
Channel: Businesses in the Subscription Economy increasingly manage subscriber relationships across multiple devices and channels. These channels create new opportunities for them to increase the value of the services they offer.

Commerce Engines Built Around a Shopping Cart Don’t Work in the Era of Relationship Commerce

Traditional commerce applications built upon a shopping cart foundation are prone to break down in this new world and face serious limitations.

Since the relationship with the consumer ends at checkout, these systems can’t monetize post-sale consumption such as pay-per-use models;
These systems were designed with the assumption that a transaction was one-time and ownership perpetual, and do not work for time-based offerings of subscription services;
These systems were only designed for an initial sale, return or exchange; however, the changing nature of subscriber relationships involves continual upgrades, downgrades, renewals, cancellations, etc.;
These systems are typically designed for a single channel (i.e., for web-based or B2C sales), and fail to enable commerce in a multi-channel B2Any world.

Legacy Commerce Applications Curtail Growth in Subscription Businesses

The limitations of commerce engines built on a shopping cart foundation place barriers to growth for businesses in the Subscription Economy. Just a few examples of the impediments include:

Lost revenue opportunities: businesses are unable to monetize time, consumption or access levels;
Expensive IT projects: businesses struggle to retrofit traditional commerce applications to meet the complex demands of commerce in the Subscription Economy;
Exponential increases in time to market: businesses launching new pricing models find that they heavily dependent on IT resources;

Disjointed customer experiences: Traditional commerce applications built on a shopping cart can only handle single channel commerce, whereas subscription businesses need to offer true multi-channel commerce experiences.

Z-Commerce NextGen Displaces “Shopping Cart Commerce” with Relationship Commerce

Zuora today announced the release of its Z-Commerce NextGen, the next generation of Zuora’s Z-Commerce application, built to power the commerce of relationships. Built on a new foundation that overcomes the limitations of traditional commerce engines, Z-Commerce NextGen includes:

Relationship order management to manage the subscriber lifecycle
- Ability to manage the complete commerce lifecycle, including upgrades, downgrades, add-ons, renewals or cancellations across any channel;
- MRR and TCV calculations to track the changing value of relationships through the customer lifecycle.
Multi-channel enablement to support both B2B and B2C commerce across multiple channels, platforms and devices
- Native integration with salesforce.com to enable assisted selling and web commerce across all salesforce applications;
- REST APIs for rapid deployment of storefronts and customer self-service portals;
- Java and Ruby SDK libraries to accelerate web deployments.
Configurability tools to enable rapid deployment of tailored commerce experiences
- Ability to add or remove fields, rearrange page sections, change lists and tables, and control page layouts by leveraging reusable components with just a few clicks;
- New components like product selector, billing account selector, and list components that can be deployed on any page within salesforce.com;
- Secure payment capture screens to accelerate cash collections and decrease DSO;
- Discount overrides to enable multiple discount levels and discount periods.
A subscription pricing engine that supports infinite models of subscription monetization
- Multiple charge models that support creative monetization strategies that drive growth.
Zuora for Salesforce to manage all aspects of relationship commerce on the salesforce.com platform, including:
- Subscription quoting tools that enable a seamless quote-to-cash experience from the sales front office to the billing and finance operations back office;
- Visibiliity into subscriptions, invoices, payments and refunds in salesforce.com to power lists, dashboards and workflows;
- Access to subscription metrics like MRR, DMRR, TCV, DTCV in salesforce.com;
- Configurations tools to enable rapid configuration of new and existing pages with clicks not code;
- Turbo Sync: 20-50X improvements in sync times for customers that sync large amounts of data from Zuora to salesforce.com.

Z-Billing and Z-Finance: Market Leading Engines Keep Getting Better

Along with Z-Commerce, two other applications Z-Billing and Z-Finance complete Zuora’s flagship subscription management product: Z-Business.

Z-Billing is the revolutionary market-leading billing engine that has enabled over 500 subscription businesses to run lights-out billing and payment processes over the past five years. With this release, the best subscription billing engine extends its lead with significant scalability improvements, additional invoice presentment options, additional payment exception handling tools, and more visibility and insights into billing data.

In 2012, Zuora announced the availability of Z-Finance. Z-Finance includes accounting close tools, revenue recognition management, summary journal entries and role-based security. In the Subscribed 2013 release, Z-Finance emerges as a” subscription subledger” with new features that deliver deeper accounting alignment, additional revenue reporting and enhanced revenue recognition tools.

COMMENTARY

“Commerce has become a largely impersonal and transactional experience, becoming a roadblock to deep customer relationships and long-term growth,” said Tien Tzuo, CEO, Zuora. “As buyers shift more towards subscription models, the shopping cart becomes irrelevant. Today, we’re empowering companies to go beyond the shopping cart with the launch of Z-Commerce NextGen, a modern-day commerce engine that brings the relationship back to the experience.

“The flexibility and ease-of-use of Z-Commerce NextGen has allowed us to launch breakthrough reporting features and a new pricing model for our online employee training platform in record time,” said Donna Wells, CEO, Mindflash. “We were able to keep our developers 100% focused on enhancing our product because, with Zuora, we could shift our pricing plans virtually overnight with no engineering work required. As a result we launched the new value-added offering months earlier than we otherwise could have… and started capturing significantly higher revenue sooner as well.”

“It is crucial to our business that we keep large volumes of data in sync between Zuora and Salesforce, giving our front office staff complete visibility into key subscriber data and metrics within Salesforce. With the release of Z-Commerce NextGen, we’ve seen our sync times drop from 5 hours to 5 minutes. This is a significant gain for TripAdvisor and a clear indication that Zuora is committed to delivering enterprise-grade scalability and performance,” said Steve Moran, Senior Director of Operations, TripAdvisor.

“The new Z-Commerce NextGen REST APIs now give us a simpler and faster way to connect Zuora to our online commerce experience and business intelligence engine. REST has quickly become the de facto protocol for web APIs,” said Ned Bryant, Vice President of Application Development, FireHost. “It’s great to partner with a company like Zuora that is not just a leader in cloud billing, but also recognizes this trend and has responded to it.

Zuora will demonstrate its new Z-Commerce NextGen at the Subscribed 2013 event September 19 and 20 in San Francisco. To learn more or register to attend, please see www.subscribed.com.

About Zuora, Inc.

Zuora is the global leader in subscription commerce and billing, helping companies in every industry transition to the Subscription Economy. Enterprise leaders and high-growth companies alike use Zuora’s multi-tenant cloud platform to launch, scale, and monetize their subscription services. Zuora’s applications work where traditional ERP applications fail: subscription pricing, quoting, orders, billing, payments, and renewals. Built from the ground up by SaaS industry veterans from salesforce.com, PayPal, and Netsuite, Zuora services innovative customers like Informatica, Tata Communications, Box, Xplornet, Ustream and Reed Business Information. To learn more about Zuora, please visitwww.zuora.com, Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, join us on LinkedIn, hang out with us on Google+, or visit Z Blog.

October 10, 2014

Subscription Models Leading the Way in the Disruption and Transformation of Global Commerce, New Research Finds

The Business Community Expects Subscription, Rental and Sharing Models to Herald Significant New Revenue Opportunities, Economist Intelligence Unit study shows

Foster City, CA – October 1, 2013

A societal shift in global consumption preferences is changing the way businesses are pricing and delivering their goods and services, new research from the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by Zuora – the subscription commerce, billing and finance leader – has found. Four out of every five (80%) businesses are currently seeing changes in how their customers prefer to access their services. As a result, over half (51%) are integrating new pricing and delivery models such as subscriptions, sharing and rental goods and services, rather than selling products outright. Of those, subscription-based models have emerged as the primary means to do so, with 40% of these companies implementing subscription services as part of their core business.

MONETIZING NEW DELIVERY MODELS

As consumers and businesses look for more flexible and convenient ways to access the services they want, new models of ownership have risen through the emergence of subscription, rental and sharing businesses, causing a major transformation in a wide range of sectors including financial services, healthcare, media, retail, technology and telecommunications.

The survey of 293 business executives in the US, UK and Australia reveals that while the move to new consumption and delivery models is being driven by consumers’ desire for more flexible pricing and greater convenience, the trend is being recognized by businesses as a powerful new revenue opportunity:

Businesses across the globe are expecting to see significant long-term economic benefits from this shift to new business models based around subscriptions, sharing and rental – 12% of respondents say these already represent more than half of their revenue. Critically, this number is expected to grow rapidly, as 84% anticipate that this share of revenue will increase somewhat or significantly over the next two years.
Businesses also recognize new revenue opportunities (37%), competitive differentiation (27%), and increased customer loyalty (25%) made possible by these new methods of pricing and delivery.
Reduced transaction costs (36%), more convenient use of goods and services (35%) and the ease with which you can upgrade or downgrade services (33%) are identified as the key consumer benefits heralded by these new subscription models.

A GLOBAL DISRUPTION IN COMMERCE

While confirming that a major global shift in how businesses engage with their customers is underway, and that the majority of businesses understand the implications of this shift, the study also reveals concern amongst businesses about their ability to navigate the disruption:

Respondents believe that recent advances in technology, including cloud computing, have been the primary drivers in this societal shift to new consumption and delivery models (selected by 37% of businesses).
However, technical complexities are identified by a third of businesses (30%) as one of the most significant challenges of moving towards these new models.
Organizational challenges (33%) and compliance issues (27%) are the other two key challenges identified with achieving the business transformation required to implement these new consumption and delivery models.

COMMENTARY

Zuora co-founder and CEO Tien Tzuo comments: “Driven first and foremost by changing consumer behavior, the development of the Subscription Economy is fundamentally changing the way successful businesses operate and opening up a worldwide market opportunity conservatively estimated at $500 billion. It is clear that businesses in many industries have recognized this transformation in customer expectations, as well as the benefits it is bringing which include longer, stronger customer relationships and increased opportunities for recurring revenues.

However, the shift to the Subscription Economy is not easy. How you price, sell, bill, collect payment and account becomes much more complex, and every line of the business must be prepared and aligned to meet the demands of this disruptive transformation in global commerce.”

Zoé Tabary, Deputy Editor at the Economist Intelligence Unit says: “The shift to new consumption and delivery models is taking place against the backdrop of more empowered consumers, who increasingly seek convenience and better value for money in goods and services. This is creating technical and organisational challenges in implementing new models, but businesses are starting to take advantage of the opportunities that they represent.”

Saar Gillai, senior vice-president and general manager at Converged Cloud at Hewlett Packard, a multinational IT company, comments: “Consumers are becoming increasingly accustomed to the flexibility of pay-as-you-go models. They are instantly able to access capabilities without paying upfront for the cap-ex, and they have better control over their spend.”

Aleyn Smith-Gillespie, associate director at Carbon Trust Advisory Services, a consultancy offering expertise on sustainable business strategy and models, comments: “Not having capital tied up in assets, having the ability to purchase on a per-user basis or over a period of time, and the ability to outsource the expertise required to maintain these goods and services are the benefits that are driving this trend.”

Giles Andrews, CEO and co-founder of Zopa, a UK-based peer-to-peer lending service says: “Before you start, do the math to be sure you can achieve economic efficiencies and are able to offer value to consumers that is better than the alternative. Technology allowed us to scale, and to provide checks and balances at all stages of the transaction. The winners are the ones who can figure out how to build a platform that protects customers while adding value in the market.”

A WORLD SUBSCRIBED

The survey results were released today at Zuora’s Subscribed Europe 2013 event in London, the only conference dedicated to success in the Subscription Economy. At the event, Zuora has also unveiled its Subscription Manifesto for the first time in Europe. The Manifesto, signed by leaders of 75 companies committed to the establishment of a modern operating model, includes a set of core values and nine guiding principles for subscription businesses to adopt. Through the collective learning and experiences of the signatories, the Manifesto provides the world’s first framework for global success in the $500 billion Subscription Economy.

An executive summary survey results, along with insights from leading business executives and independent experts, will form the basis of an Economist Intelligence Unit briefing paper, sponsored by Zuora can be found here: https://bit.ly/18kLerA

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Infographic: Subscriptions Disrupting & Transforming Global Commerce
Blog: Moving to a World Subscribed – New Survey Shows Changing Patterns in Consumption and Delivery
Subscribed Europe 2013
Follow @Zuora on Twitter
Like Zuora on Facebook
Connect with us on LinkedIn

About Zuora, Inc.

Zuora is the global leader in subscription commerce and billing, helping companies in every industry transition to the Subscription Economy. Enterprise leaders and high-growth companies alike use Zuora’s multi-tenant cloud platform to launch, scale, and monetize their subscription services. Zuora’s applications work where traditional ERP applications fail: Subscription pricing, quoting, orders, billing, payments, and renewals. Built from the ground up by SaaS industry veterans from salesforce.com, PayPal, and Netsuite, Zuora services innovative customers like Informatica, Tata Communications, Box.net, Xplornet, Ustream and Reed Business Information. To learn more about Zuora, please visit www.zuora.com

About Economist Intelligence Unit

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) is the world’s leading resource for economic and business research, forecasting and analysis. It provides accurate and impartial intelligence for companies, government agencies, financial institutions and academic organisations around the globe, inspiring business leaders to act with confidence since 1946. EIU products include its flagship Country Reports service, providing political and economic analysis for 195 countries, and a portfolio of subscription-based data and forecasting services. The company also undertakes bespoke research and analysis projects on individual markets and business sectors. More information is available at www.eiu.com or follow us on www.twitter.com/theeiu

The EIU is headquartered in London, UK, with offices in more than 40 cities and a network of some 650 country experts and analysts worldwide. It operates independently as the business-to-business arm of The Economist Group, the leading source of analysis on international business and world affairs.

October 10, 2014

Global 2000 Leaders and Disruptive Growth Companies Alike Recognized in Zuora Subscribed Innovation Awards

Tata Communications, NCR Corporation, News UK, Box, DocuSign, Emma Inc., CloudBees and MLSListings Honored as Leaders in the Subscription Economy at Subscribed 2013

Foster City,CA – 23 October 2013

SUMMARY

Zuora, the subscription commerce, billing and finance leader, announced the winners of the second annual Zuora Subscribed Innovation awards, which recognize companies of all sizes that have creatively built, scaled and optimized their businesses through the subscription model.
This year’s honorees include global enterprises and disruptive growth companies alike that have leveraged Zuora to help build better businesses and take advantage of the massive opportunity in the $500 billion Subscription Economy.
The awards honor companies for innovation in the Subscription Economy, including:
- The Grow Award: Innovation in launching and scaling subscription businesses
- The Flow Award: Innovation in managing complex subscription processes to drive operational efficiencies
- The Know Award: Innovation in using insight to improve subscription business success
- The Subscription Business Innovation Award: Represents excellence in all three areas

2013 AWARDEES BREAK NEW GROUND IN THE SUBSCRIPTION ECONOMY

Subscription Business Innovation Awards
- NCR Corporation was honored with the Subscription Business Innovation Award in the North American enterprise category for successfully launching NCR Silver, a cutting-edge point of sale (“POS”) solution designed to meet the specific needs of the small business market. NCR Silver returns the 130 year-old company to its small market roots and augments the corporation’s mid-tier to large enterprise global solutions. Amid its swift, concentrated 4-month development period, NCR Silver exhibited a fresh pace of enterprise innovation. Providing a complete marketing and POS solution that runs on Apple iOS mobile devices, NCR Silver is easily customizable, and customers are up and running effectively within minutes. With the launch of NCR Silver, the Fortune 500 organization is poised to move from a hardware-centric business to a leading, progressive SaaS company.
- The enterprise Subscription Business Innovation Award in EMEA went to News UK, which is leading digital innovation in the media industry. News UK has developed some of the most sophisticated apps available, enabling automatically prepared content to appear on numerous devices. Their path to online and the resulting need to build more direct relationships with their customers has led News to take over a lot of functions they previously outsourced, changing their operation and developing new skills and capabilities in the process.
- DocuSign, The Global Standard for eSignature® that helps more than 40 million consumers and businesses send, sign, track, and store documents in the cloud, was also honored with the Subscription Business Innovation Award in the disruptive growth category. The company turned to Zuora with its wide range of customers and expanding set of services and has grown more than 150% year-over-year by streamlining processes. The implementation process with Zuora was seamless and quick, making it easy for DocuSign to continue to grow its business in key verticals, including insurance, financial services, healthcare/biopharma, high tech and real estate, without missing a beat. They leverage Zuora for commerce, billing and finance capabilities.
- In the disruptive growth category, Zuora awarded the Subscription Business Innovation Award at Subscribed Europe to CloudBees. CloudBees offers the first Java Platform as a Service (PaaS). They allow developers to build, run and manage Java applications in the cloud. CloudBees leverages Zuora for a fully automated bill-to-cash process for its no-touch sales, assisted-sales as well as its more traditional enterprise sales model. CloudBees embraces a key value of the Subscription Economy, which is to experiment with pricing and continually review, analyze and improve their pricing schemas to optimize their processes. Not only is the company growing rapidly, operating in Europe and the USA, but it has greatly enhanced customer service and improved customer loyalty through its slick interface and smart automation.
The Grow Award
- Box, a leader in cloud collaboration, won the Grow Award for leveraging Zuora to help accelerate its growth in the U.S. and abroad. In the midst of a global expansion, Box needs to be able to support international enterprises by handling pricing and packaging in multiple currencies. With Zuora, Box has been able to customize pricing, and easily handle every upsell, add-on, and change order that comes their way. Box grew more than 150 percent last year and is expected to more than double again this year.
The Flow Award
- Tata Communications is a leading global communications and enterprise IT service provider that owns and operates the world’s most advanced subsea cable network, delivering first class infrastructure, enterprise solutions and partnerships to carriers and businesses worldwide. The company was awarded the Flow Award for Process Innovation following its long-term strategic move to virtualize its customer subscription infrastructure, in collaboration with salesforce.com and Zuora. As a result, business operational efficiencies are improved which, in turn, enhances customer experience when subscribing to new products, including CDN, Telepresence and jamvee™ conferencing.
- MLSListings, provides accurate, timely and actionable real estate information services to brokers, agents and the consuming public. The company won the Flow Award for Process Innovation for leveraging Zuora to address its subscription management challenges. MLSListings introduced a full-service interface which enables internal users to have a 360 degree view of subscribers. The interface also enables automated invoicing and the ability to manage subscribers more effectively. These capabilities have greatly improved processes, resulting in reduced costs and an enhanced subscriber experience.
The Know Award
- Emma, Inc., a web-based service that enables customers to create, send and track creative email campaigns and surveys, won the Know Award. As Emma Inc. was looking to grow, it deployed Zuora to manage its subscription offerings, which ultimately enabled them to achieve explosive growth through informed decision-making. The Emma finance team has built powerful reports and dashboards to keep the business in the know about how they are doing with new and existing customers. These dashboards highlight data including analysis for different markets and geographic locations, revenue growth, account growth and churn rates. They also have dashboards with relevant metrics for high-value customers.

COMMENTARY

“NCR Corporation is pleased to be the recipient of the 2013 Subscription Business Innovation award. With Zuora as a technology partner, NCR Silver delivers on its promise to provide a simple end to end solution that enables entrepreneurs and business owners the opportunity to efficiently manage and grow their businesses,” said Bill Plummer, Director, NCR Corporation. “To succeed in an ever-changing space, we must be able to respond quickly and effectively to the requirements of our customers, as well as shifting business models in the subscription economy. Zuora enables NCR Silver to do just that, and we are honored to receive this innovation award.”
“With Zuora, Box has a scalable and flexible platform to help us manage subscriptions at a time of incredible expansion and growth,” said Dan Levin, Chief Operating Officer, Box. “Today, Box can easily manage the subscriptions of our growing customer base across different segments, vertical industries and geographies. Whether it’s adding seats to an existing deployment, rolling out a new customer or entering an entirely new country, Zuora keeps it simple and easy to manage.”
“Zuora has been key in helping DocuSign better understand and serve our growing customer base. DocuSign is pleased to be recognized for the growth in our business and honored to receive the Subscription Business Innovation Award,” said Matt Marquez, Corporate Controller, DocuSign.
“Emma Inc. has been using Zuora since 2009, and we are pleased to be recognized with this award,” said Patrick Block, Director of Financial Planning & Analysis, Emma, Inc. “We’re continuously impressed by Zuora’s innovation and execution on ideas that help Emma grow and satisfy our customer base.”
“We are honored to receive this award from Zuora. MLSListings was the first multiple listing service in the United States to launch an integrated version of the Salesforce and Zuora platforms,” said Jeremy Crawford, COO, MLSListings. “The 360 view of our customers has resulted in greatly enhanced service and satisfaction to our subscribers, increased efficiencies, reduced overhead costs, and increased customer retention.”
“We are delighted to receive this Process Innovation Award from Zuora, which reaffirms our long-term commitment to provide better customers experience through enhanced operational efficiencies,” said Aditya Jayaraman, Head and Sr. Director, CDN Product Management, Tata Communications.
“Startups, SMBs and multinationals use the same CloudBees cloud services but they want to consume them differently. With Zuora, we were able to efficiently meet these various expectations and scale at the same time, with almost no operational impact,” said Cloudbees Vice President François Déchery.

ZUORA COMMENTARY

“Zuora customers are behind the unstoppable momentum of the Subscription Economy,” said Tien Tzuo, CEO, Zuora. “The Subscribed Innovation award highlights a range of companies, from large enterprises to small, high growth businesses, who are flexing their innovative muscle to emerge as industry leaders in this new business model.”

About Zuora, Inc.

Zuora is the global leader in subscription commerce and billing, helping companies in every industry transition to the Subscription Economy. Enterprise leaders and high-growth companies alike use Zuora’s multi-tenant cloud platform to launch, scale, and monetize their subscription services. Zuora’s applications work where traditional ERP applications fail: Subscription pricing, quoting, orders, billing, payments, and renewals. Built from the ground up by SaaS industry veterans from salesforce.com, PayPal, and Netsuite, Zuora services innovative customers like Informatica, Tata Communications, Box.net, Xplornet, Ustream and Reed Business Information. To learn more about Zuora, please visit www.zuora.com

October 10, 2014