As Nikki Wong, Director of Project Management at AppDynamics notes, “Lots of times, with a company our size, a sales team will go to market without considering revenue implications. Today we don’t have to worry about that — our business strategy is aligned with our revenue strategy.”
About
A Cisco company, AppDynamics is an application monitoring platform that calls itself the central nervous system of enterprise computing.
Industry:
01
The Challenge
In addition to a planned IPO and breakneck growth, the finance team at AppDynamics was contending with a host of complex revenue allocations.
02
The Solution
AppDynamics adopted Zuora Revenue, the world’s leading revenue automation solution for ASC 606 and IFRS 15.
03
The Benefits
With Zuora, AppDynamics has automated processes and gained dramatic efficiencies. In fact, the company has reduced the time to close its books by forty percent.
With Zuora, AppDynamics has automated processes and gained dramatic efficiencies. In fact, the company has reduced the time to close its books by forty percent.
AppDynamics provides real-time monitoring of applications to detect anomalies and keep business running smoothly. They help companies actively monitor, analyze and optimize complex application environments at scale. Gary Duncan, a Vice President of Digital Services and Operations at BMW Group, likes to call AppDynamics “an MRI of your enterprise.”
In 2016, AppDynamics was experiencing rocketship-like growth, but management was keenly aware they needed a revenue automation system in anticipation of a planned public offering, as well as the new incoming revenue recognition standards.
After adopting Zuora, the results soon followed. The finance team was not only able to stop manually recognizing revenue for their high volume of complex contracts, but they are now able to properly account for professional services revenue. Previously, professional services revenue had to be manually recognized ratably over time. Now, AppDynamics is able to automatically recognize professional services revenue as a percentage of completion, thus more tightly aligning the revenue earned to the services delivered and reducing risk. They also reduced the time it took to close their books by forty percent.
In short, the team freed themselves from audits and anomalies. Instead, they were able to “level up,” engage in the analysis provided by Zuora’s management reporting and configurable dashboard capabilities to stop manually accounting for revenue and start driving strategic decisions across the organization. This was the biggest differentiation factor that drove the team to choose Zuora over lighter weight revenue solutions. After all, insights are what AppDynamics is all about.
And the AppDynamics revenue team isn’t the only one benefiting from Zuora Revenue. Their Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) team is taking advantage of Zuora Revenue insights in order to hone their forecasts and waterfall predictions. And their sales team now has a clear line of sight into the potential downstream revenue effects of new product offerings.
As Nikki Wong, Director of Project Management at AppDynamics notes, “Lots of times, with a company our size, a sales team will go to market without considering revenue implications. Today we don’t have to worry about that — our business strategy is aligned with our revenue strategy.”
AppDynamics now has a dependable (and perhaps more importantly, scalable) revenue automation structure that allows it to accelerate growth over time.
