
Overcoming The Cloud Cost Conundrum
The fact that cloud computing means that technology is democratized and available to all is either the best thing ever, or the worst thing ever. For business units it’s great – it gives them the ability to acquire technology without going through the often long and torturous process with IT. For IT and CFOs, however, technology democratization is painful…

FinancialForce 2012 Release–Delivering a Loosely Coupled Set of Solutions
Nicely timed to coincide with next week’s DreamForce conference comes the summer 2012 release from FinancialForce, the cloud accounting company that is both part owned by Salesforce, and built upon the force.com platform. While product announcements tend to be a little ho-hum, this one is interesting since it comes from

Zuora Partners With a Host of Mid Market Financial Vendors
In my extensive writing around the subscription billing space, I have often noted that it is a very polarized sector of our industry with a handful of well funded companies providing services for large organizations – Zuora, Vindicia and Aria fit in this space. These companies are maneuvering for position

Zuora and Citrix Announce Partnership
News today of yet another partnership for SaaS subscription and billing provider Zuora – this time they’re signing up Citrix as a customer with Zuora powering the subscription and billing parts of Citrix’ CloudPortal Services Manager. The deal is essentially a simple one, Citrix wants to provide cloud tools

Reflecting on RLM – Transverse Billing and Subscription Vendor
When in Austin recently I took the opportunity to meet with Transverse, another player in a space I call Revenue Lifecycle Management of RLM. Revenue Lifecycle Management includes the obvious functional area such as subscription and billing services, but extends these into a realm that deals with the entire lifecycle of a customers relationship with […]

OneBill Launches (Another) Subscription Commerce Platform
Just when the world thought it was well provided for subscription commerce toolsets, OneBill is today launching its own take on this product area. Subscription billing is a massive area of opportunity as organizations look to gain increased flexibility and agility when it comes to selling their products in new

Is SaaS Dead? No. Neither is Debate.
We’ve had email dead, resumes dead, wikis dead themes, now it’s apparently time for the SaaS is Dead meme, thanks to a recently published Gartner report. My favorite quote from the report: SaaS is not a panacea, and companies need to evaluate and understand the trade-offs that SaaS presents Indeed. Here’s another quote from Gartner […]

Zuora and Azure Hook Up to Bill the Cloud
And here was me thinking the cloud was all about altruism – no folks, it’s about money, pure and simple. Saving it at the buy-side, making it at the sell-side. News today from Zuora (see disclosure) that they will join the Microsoft Windows Azure Technology Adoption Program (TAP) as the first on-demand billing and subscription […]

Xactly – and Managing a Company Through Growth
Recently, while in San Jose for the loud Connect conference, I took advantage of an offer from Zuora (see disclosure) to visit a number of different vendors – in part to look at how they’re utilized third party subscription services to power their businesses but more specifically to look at the pain points they’ve encountered […]

Subscription and Billing Services – Outsource or Roll You Own?
The next paper Krish and I are writing over at Diversity Analysis is one looking at subscription and billing services. It’s an area I’ve touched on frequently here and is a relatively busy, and increasingly complex, space. I’ve talked previously about Zuora, Vindicia, Aria systems and have spent much time in the past few days […]
Billing and the Services Tsunami: What Online Companies Really Need To Understand
Here at CloudAve we’ve had a recent theme of guest posts from subscription billing companies (Zuora and Aria). It’s a really interesting area (honestly) and the various vendors all have a slightly different take on it. This time it’s the turn of Gene Hoffman, CEO of Vindicia to give his perspective. Tien Tzou and Ed […]
An Overview of the Subscription Economy: How It’s Affecting Traditional Businesses, Cloud Computing and You
A guest post from Tien Tzou, CEO of Zuora (more on Zuora here). At CloudAve we welcome guest posts and invite your submissions – feel free to contact us here. From DVDs to cars, products that we once purchased are transforming into services to which we now subscribe. Why buy a DVD, when you can […]

Zuora – Bringing Subscriptions to Media (Huh?)
Zuora, the provider of billing components for SaaS companies (review here), is about to lift the lid on it’s latest offering – providing billing and subscription services to media companies. Yes you heard it right, newspapers, those venerable and (if you believe the hype) mortally wounded organizations that have been selling their wares by subscription […]

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 […]