The Business Cloud: Powered by the Z-Commerce Platform

by Tien Tzuo

We're starting off 2009 with a bang.

Today, we are launching our fourth and – in my opinion – our most important product to date: the Z-Commerce Platform. Following up on our Z-Billing, Z-Payments and Z-Force offerings, the Z-Commerce Platform is the very first development environment dedicated to helping developers monetize their cloud-based services.

Why did we do this now?

The 'Cloud Wars' are upon us – Microsoft, salesforce.com, Amazon, Google, HP, IBM, you name it – these companies are duking it out for ownership of the cloud. In the same way that Java, .NET, PHP and other languages fought for the hearts and minds of developers ten years ago, in 2009, we're going to see developers identify with major cloud platforms such as Force.com, AppEngine, AWS or Azure.

However, as exciting as this vision is, it's missing one big thing: how will these developers monetize all these services they build for the cloud? How will they get paid? Without a commerce component to fuel its growth, cloud computing cannot fulfill its true potential.

What developers need is a Business Cloud -- any easy way to add commerce capabilities such as subscription billing and recurring payments to the services they are building, and they need it in the same way that they use services from Amazon, or Google, or Force.com.

That's where the Z-Commerce Platform comes in.

The Z-Commerce Platform is the first example of the Business Cloud -- a set of cloud-based services dedicated to giving developers the tools they need to monetize the services they are building on cloud platforms.

You can learn more about the Z-Commerce Platform and get involved in the Z-Developer Network.

2009 is indeed shaping up to be the Year of the Cloud, and we are ready…