Zuora Disrupts OnDemand Subscription Billing Industry

One of the highest profile “spinoffs” to date in the Software As A Service Industry, Zuora aims to disrupt the OnDemand Subscription Billing Industry just like Salesforce.com disrupted the software industry a few years ago.

Based in Redwood City, Zuora provides a OnDemand solution that automates and simplifies online subscription billing services. Zuora’s flagship product is Z-Billing.

Z-Billing is a fully integrated Billing as Service Platform that offers features that are critical to On Demand subscription based businesses such as advanced pricing models, integrated business intelligence and metrics, account management and provisioning, multi-currency support and automated credit card processing.

Z-Billing offers full integration with Salesforce.com but also has an impressive list of pre built integrations for mid level ERP and CRM packages as well as Enterprise level software like Oracle and SAP’s Business Suites. A robust web services API rounds out Z-Billing’s integration offerings and allow a customer to integrate Z-Billing with all of its internal products and systems.

The pricing of the Z-Billing service starts out at 2% of invoiced revenue with additional discounts based on billing volume. Targeted originally towards subscription based online businesses, the Z-Billing team is also focusing on investment firms, analog companies like NetJet and ZipCar and the greater SMB market with its recently announced partnership with StrikeIron.

With 17 live customers since Z-Billing’s May 20th release, Zuora has all the key ingredients in place for success. It has an all star management team lead by CEO Tien Tzuo, former Chief Strategy Officer at Salesforce.com, K.V. Rao; former senior VP at Web Ex and Cheng Zuo; Zuora CTO, who built Web Ex’s Subscription billing systems. Zuora also has a 6.5 million initial funding round led by Benchmark Capital with a substantial investment from the Software as a Service titan; Marc Benioff.

Initial Z-Billing customers include Coremetrics, Cloud 9 Analytics and Marketo. Zuora’s competitors include OpSource (LeCayla), Aria Systems and Evapt.

1. David , July 31, 2008:

   I dont understand the Zuora Pricing of 2% of billings? How do they figure out what billings are in a 3rd party system like Quick Books or SAP?

2. The Truth , August 1, 2008:

   Calling Zuora a high-profile ‘spin-off’ and ‘disruptive’ shows what little knowledge the industry has of Zuora.

3. SmokingAces , August 1, 2008:

   Funny title…shouldnt it be more like “Zuora enters Subscription Billing Space – Market leaders way ahead”? Your title is thought provoking but both Aria and Opsource have been selling subscription billing on-demand for at least two years. From what I hear they are already successfully “disrupting the Subscription Billing market”.

4. Kelli , October 2, 2008:

   Zuora has only just entered the market…kind of like showing up to the dance when the band has been playing for a few hours already.

   Aria and OpSource are great examples of SaaS billing that’s been around a LOT longer…