A couple of weeks ago I was out in the Bay Area to attend Giga OM’s Structure event. One of the interesting individuals I met there was Tien Tzuo, CEO and founder of Zuora. Zuora, which counts salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff as an investor, "bills" itself as the leader in subscription billing and payment solutions. Here is what Tien had to say:
Some of the topics Tien tackles:
- Zuroa as the "Salesforce.com for online billing" (they are a hosted SaaS offering with a point and click interface.
- Their focus on companies that have a recurring subscription based business model e.g. SaaS, cloud, online media…
- Their launch of Zcommerce for the cloud which provides billing, reoccurring payment capability and subscription management capability for cloud environments.
- The great variety of pricing and packaging models when it comes to cloud payment: an arrears model, a minimum volume commitment model a pre-pay model etc.
- The concept of moving from a product-centric society to "The subscription economy," you see it in transportation, music, computing …
Extra-credit reading
- ZDNet: Zuora and the Subscription Economy
- VentureBeat: Zuora Brings Its Subscription Technology to Cloud Providers
Pau for now…