Zuora Launches Next Product at Paypal’s Innovate09

by Erik Haus

In the spirit of Halloween, we at Zuora have a few tricks up our sleeves and a few new treats to offer customers. We'll be launching our next offering at PayPal's Innovate09, their first dedicated developer conference.

We’re proud to support one of our premier partners as their Platinum Sponsor for the inaugural event. While we can’t spill the beans about we’re launching until the actual event, rest assured that the name "Innovate" is well deserved. PayPal, who pioneered online payments, is continuing its leadership in the payments space with its Open Platform X. Zuora’s state-of-the-art subscription commerce platform already seamlessly integrates with PayPal's products, but stay tuned for the next phase of our integration.

Come check us out at the conference. It takes place November 3-4, 2009 in San Francisco. Register online at: https://www.paypal-communications.com/innovate2009/index.html.

Or, to learn more about Zuora's developer tools, check out the Zuora Developer Network.

Looking forward to seeing you there, and be sure to see our new offering!

Zuora Helps Salesforce.com Partners Monetize Their AppExchange Listings

by Tricia Reilly

Zuora’s AppExchange team is gearing up for a busy Fall. This month, we’re hosting a webinar on Oct. 21st titled, Make Your AppExchange Listing Work for You. Featuring two of the most successful AppExchange vendors, Marketo and InsideView, as well as salesforce.com’s VP Alliances, we’ll share how Zuora is already helping AppExchange vendors monetize their listing.

Then, we’ll be taking the message to salesforce.com’s annual global gathering, Dreamforce ’09. We’ll be evangelizing our cloud and subscription commerce services, and launching a new product. We can’t tell you what it is, but you won’t want to miss out!

We’ll also be presenting at two sessions at Dreamforce and sponsoring the AppExchange Appreciation Party at Temple on Thursday evening.

Here’s how you can learn about how Zuora is helping the AppExchange community:

• Register for our Webinar on October 21st - Make Your AppExchange Listing Work for You
• Come See Us at Dreamforce ’09
  • Register and use promo code EXH50050 to save $100 http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/DF09/site/
• Drop by Booth #203 or our demo station in the Salesforce.com Campground and talk Cloud Computing, AppExchange, and all things Subscription Commerce.
• Attend our Sessions
  • 11/19 @ 7.30AM: Tien Tzuo, Maximize Your Revenues: Market and Deliver Your Solutions on the AppExchange
  • 11/20 @ 9AM: Tricia Reilly, Bridging the Gap: VP Sales & Marketing
• Follow us on Twitter – we’ll be tweeting from both shows from the handle @Zuora!

Seattle Web 2.0 Community is Brewing

by Megan Golden

Yesterday, Zuora packed our bags and headed north to Seattle for our fourth Z-tour event this year.

Our luncheon was held at The Dahlia Lounge--fit for foodies and known as the epicenter of Northwest Cuisine featuring flakey crab cakes and steaming doughnuts.

Once the room was packed with a very engaging Seattle crowd, our CEO, Tien Tzuo spoke on how the world is moving to subscriptions. Everything from Netflix to Salesforce.com to ZipCar. The interesting point here is that while the subscription model enables greater flexibility for consumers, the need for a robust packaging and pricing model is key to subscription success.

We were thrilled to welcome local customer TalentSpring, who gave a testimonial on how they came to choose Zuora as their subscription billing platform and their results to date.

TalentSpring is a SaaS solution for candidate sourcing utilizing semantic search technology. Rather than focusing their time on company infrastructure, it was key for TalentSpring to direct all their resources to product development and candidate sourcing. It was also critical that they build their business processes quickly and seamlessly through salesforce.com. That's where Zuora came in!

The solution for TalentSpring was Zuora's suite of Subscription Management tools. With Z-Billing & Z-Payments, they have been able to build, test, quote, close, invoice, and collect cash through Zuora's integration with salesforce.com with no additional IT resources required; all implementation and testing was completed by the VP of Sales!

In fact Mike Hayes, VP of Sales at TaletSpring said, "Every part of Zuora we’ve touched from the sales cycle to the post sales team to support has been fantastic!"

In the early planning stages for this event, we had expected this to be an intimate event with a handful of SaaS companies. However, despite the massive and unforeseen road construction blocking the entrance to the restaurant (thank you Seattle Department of Transportation. not.) we had an amazing turnout. Standing. Room. Only.

After getting to know some of our attendees and visiting with our customers, we realized that the Saas community in Seattle is more than just brewing; it's here to stay. Coming from the mecca of the Web 2.0 community here in Silicon Valley, it's so exciting to see other subscription communities evolve and create their own story in other cities.

Seattle, we will definitely be back!

Z-Billing 2.0 Launch: Subscription and SaaS-Powered Business Community Gets Together

by Tricia Reilly

Tuesday night, Zuora hosted a cocktail party at La Mar, celebrating the launch of our Z-Billing 2.0 subscription billing service and the fact that we’ve signed over 100 SaaS billing customers in less than a year.

For those of you who may not know, San Francisco experienced a bit of a heat wave last week, so the unseasonably warm weather made for an ideal dockside get together for the who’s who of the SaaS world.

At one point I was speaking with a group of Zuora customers and I realized that we were all already using or switching to subscription services in virtually every aspect of our businesses; from marketing automation to webmail to business intelligence.

It suddenly dawned on me that not only is Zuora enabling SaaS and subscription companies to grow revenue and increase operational efficiency, but we’ve created a community of subscription savvy companies who are relying more and more on cloud computing services to enable focus and growth.

In addition to sipping Pisco Sours, I proceeded to spend a good part of the evening introducing customers to partners, prospects to customers, and so on. It reminded me of the early days of the Internet when I worked for one of the largest web hosting companies. Not only were customers side by side in the data center with the hottest Internet properties, but they derived real business value from industry events which were a hotbed of business development activity.

With the launch (and the heat wave) firmly behind us, I’m looking forward to seeing the next wave of charge models for existing and new subscription products to drive growth for our customers and partners. Can you think of a way you’d like to price that we haven’t thought of yet? Did you find a new prospect at the launch event? Drop us a note and let us know!