There can be no doubt that we are moving towards, what Zuora calls a "subscription economy."  From simple DVD's in the mail to complex on demand managed hosting services, we as consumers and business are becoming a pay-as-you-go society.  And that's where Zuora comes in...  Yesterday, I had the pleasure of being invited to Zuora's Z-Tour event at Zibibbo Restaurant in downtown Palo Alto.  For those that don't know, Zuora is an on demand subscription billing solution that is quickly joining the ranks of Salesforce.com and Successfactors as one of the shining examples of SaaS maturity.  In a nutshell, their product helps companies manage their subscription billing processes from "quote to cash". 

In attendance were both current customers, prospective customers and people like me who were curious.  At the forefront of my mind while arriving at Zibibbo was the number "1 BILLION".  That number being the amount of money Zuora booked in Q1 of this year in contracted subscription revenue.  How did they do that in today's recovering economy with sales cycles that likely began at the peak of America's second Great Depression?  To hear it from their customers, the reasons were simple...  Zuora's the best.  Whether these companies were public Fortune 500 organizations or barely profitable startups, the pain points were similar.  There were simply no good options out there for managing their subscription payments.  Surprisingly, Excel was a common solution, but errors and lack of control were complaints.  Then there were the homegrown solutions that may have worked at one point, until the product changed, there were pricing adjustments or there was a need to integrate subscription data into an accounting system or CRM.  Lastly, some companies tried to make their accounting system a subscription billing system, but they ended up creating obscure line items that we used but once or twice.  As Jay Webster of Quova, a Zuora customer, put it, "solutions are either a pain killer or a vitamin and in the case of Zuora, they are a vitamin infused aspirin!"      

I thoroughly enjoyed my formal introduction to Zuora and I would certainly recommend that my peers in subscription based organizations check it out.  They obviously do well for SaaS and Cloud companies that bill on a subscription or use basis, but their product is flexible enough to be used by media companies, shopping services, cheese of the month clubs, etc.

For more info visit: Zuora.com