Zuora – Doing some of the Heavy Lifting for SaaS Vendors

At the recent Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco I met with Tien Tzuo, CEO of Zuora, a provider focussing solely on billing
solutions for SaaS vendors. Tien was part of the earliest days of salesforce.com and has seen the massive
amounts of work, both initial and ongoing, that billing crates for SaaS vendors.
While initial per-user per-month charging models are easy to deal with -
complexities such as pay-by-use, partial billing periods, complex channel
relationships and charging deals with third party vendors all build complexities
upon complexities that conspire to make it a difficult area of vendor
operations.

Enter Zuora who, backed by big names such as Benchmark and Marc Benioff himself, sell their product with the same
rationale that their prospective customers sell theirs – why build for yourself
something which isn’t part of your core competency – in the same way that you
outsource your data centre (be it cloud or physical) so to should you consider
outsourcing your billing platform.

A year after introducing their product to the market, Zuora have just
released Z-billing 2.0. Their new release has some major improvements on the
original as detailed in their release PR;

More Power. Z-Billing 2.0 provides 33 new features to
increase revenues. With more billing, pricing and payment options that can be
tailored to fit specific market segments, Z-Billing 2.0 makes it possible for
companies to respond to market changes by offering services at the right price
and terms.

More Automation.Z-Billing 2.0 provides 33 new features to eliminate
manual processes.More mass updating tools, auto-sync capabilities, and workflow
enable customers to streamline business operations. More integration options to
websites, provisioning, accounting, CRM, and payments systems connect all
business operations systems seamlessly. Z-Billing 2.0’s logging and tracking
capabilities provide automatic audit trails for compliance and security needs.

Even Easier to Use.Z-Billing 2.0 provides 33 new features that make
your billing operations even easier.Zuora’s new UI simplifies the management of
full customer subscription lifecycle by giving sales teams, accounting teams,
and customers a 360-degree view of data instantaneously. Invoice and payment
history, usage, and rollover data are now available with a few
mouse-clicks.

New Taxation Module.  Z-Billing 2.0 provides a new Taxation module
that is easy to set up and supports all tax types including Sales and Use, Value
Added (VAT), Goods and Services (GST), etc.  Taxes can be applied to any address
with the ability to report taxes to various jurisdictions.  As well, Zuora is
pleased to announce key partnerships with the leading sales tax software
companies Sabrix, Vertex, and Avalara.

Zuora is also proud of the fact that they’ve rolled up ver 100 customers
since their launch – including (in what is fantastic timing for a press release
given yesterdays news) Sun Microsystems. Also on board are
Cloud9 Analytics,
Marketo, Home-Account, CitySquares, LiveOffice and
Box.net.

SaaS is moving incredibly fast and it’s almost impossible for a company to
both build it’s own product, react to innovations on the part of their customers
and build all the back office stuff a vendor needs all at the same time. The
first two from that list are non-negotiable, as is the marketing and brand
management parts of the third. However the more commodity services that can be
farmed out the better – billing would seem to me a natural candidate to
outsource and given the pedigree of some of Zuora’s existing customers they’re
worth a look.