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.