Zuora Holiday Food Drive: When Opportunity Knocks at the Wrong Door

by Erik Haus

Like most startups, Zuora can be quite a hectic place. Whether we’re gearing up for a monthly product release, a new marketing launch, or the typical end of the month sales rush, there is always something to occupy our time. So it takes quite a meaningful event for the entire company to take time away from their jobs, especially this time of year. But when some mysterious barrels were delivered to our office, we had the catalyst for just such an event. We share an office building with Biz360, a social media monitoring company, and a Zuora customer. For the last few years, they’ve held a holiday food drive to support the Second Harvest Food Bank, the food bank for San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties, serving over 200,000 people each month. Each year, Second Harvest brings them barrels in which Biz360 places their donations.

Well this year, the barrels were accidentally delivered to our office. While we didn't know how they arrived, we here at Zuora were not about to let a fortuitous opportunity like this pass. As the saying goes, when opportunity comes knocking, even at the wrong door, be sure to answer! And so we did, and turned misdelivered barrels into our first annual Z-Food Drive.

To make the food drive both fun and productive, we divided the company into three teams, and made it a competition to see who could donate the most food. We divided the employees into three teams based on department (engineering, services, sales, support, etc), but marketing quickly turned our three teams into Team Ralphie, Team Red Ryder, and Team Leg Lamp, based on the classic holiday movie A Christmas Story.

Our food drive was a resounding success. As you can see from the photo, each team more than filled their respective barrels. Not only was this a fun competition that company could rally around and allow us to take a breather from our event filled work schedules, but it was also a great way for Zuora to give back to our community.

   

Needless to say, from the success of our holiday food drive, we'll be following in Biz360's footsteps, and making the Z-Food Drive an annual tradition. This goes to show you we can just as easily give back on a recurring basis, as we can help companies monetize on a recurring basis.

Happy holidays to all, and have a great 2010.

Adopting Cloud Computing to Green Your Enterprise

by Tricia Reilly

At a recent Zuora board meeting, one of our board members, unable to find a paper cup in the kitchenette, returned to the board room mug in hand noting how ‘green’ a company we are.

At Zuora, we take a hands-on approach to efficient resource management and reducing our environmental impact. And although we strive to reduce waste, encourage recycling, and carpool as much as possible, making your business environmentally friendly can be a bit of a challenge.

The good news for us is that leveraging cloud computing services, running a subscription business, and implementation of SaaS projects all offer great ways to green your IT department.

But what’s good for the Earth can also be good for business:

• New “green” data centers equipped to handle cloud computing are finding ways to operate better, faster and more efficiently than in-house operations because it’s all they do. Better energy efficiency means a reduced carbon footprint.
• Subscription services delivered online are inherently green because you only pay for what you need as capacity is shared across multiple customer instances to reduce overall power, hardware, and software components.
• By leveraging services in the cloud, you free up valuable internal resources to focus on developing solutions that you can actually sell. And that means the kind of green you can take to the bank.

These points prove that greening your company can be an amazingly lucrative business option. If we are aware of the possibilities, we can make environmental consciousness an everyday reality of our corporate culture.

We are making progress but it’s really important to understand that everything from printing, faxing, and paper waste to use of computer hardware, data centers, and electricity impact how green your business is.

I can think of some innovative ways Zuora uses the cloud to reduce our carbon footprint: Google Docs, WebEx and eFax are just a few. What are some ways that your company uses cloud computing or SaaS projects to make your company greener?

Zuora Gives Back

by Megan Golden

When I made my transition from Salesforce.com to Zuora in early 2008, I had hoped to bring with me the spirit of giving back that is core to Salesforce's working culture. What was surprising, however was that I landed at a company where several others shared that same vision!

That's why it was so easy to rally our team for a couple of hot days to put down their Blackberries and fasten their toolbelts for Habitat for Humanity. Mind you, this was the last week of our quarter and we even got our sales team out there!

In two separate all day sessions we put our brains and muscles to work on a housing project in the Bayview area of San Francisco. Some of us hung siding and fastened beams and some of us just looked good in a hard hat - c'mon you need at least one of those on every construction site, right?

The Habitat for Humanity and Americorps teams were truly a dream to work with. I mean, not everyone can be gracious with the’ I've-Never-Picked-Up-A-Hammer’ crowd, as well as the ‘I-Know-It-All-When-It-Comes-To-Handy -Work’ set. I’m not telling you which category I fall into.

But really, what they do for communities all over the US is no doubt inspirational. Over and over again they hand over new beginnings to deserving families; pulling communities together through leadership and team work.

We’ve all experienced our share of corporate team building exercises from trust walks to scavenger hunts to walking across hot coals (ouch!), but nothing compares to the camaraderie developed by working together to actually build something of real value – and for a deserving member of our community no less.

Once again, I've found myself at a company that not only values giving back but views projects like this as a corporate responsibility. There are multiple reasons why I love working at Zuora, but this is a biggie for sure.

If you’re interested in joining Zuora, check out our Careers page.