Company:           Zuora
Started:               2006
Located:              Redwood Shores, California   USA
Geography:         North America
Market:                Subscription Billing
Products:             Z-billing: Complete billing solution for subscription businesses
                             Z-payments: Payment solution for subscription businesses
                             Z-Force: Billing and payment system fully integrated with salesforce.com
                             Z-Commerce Platform: Commerce platform for cloud developers
Key Customers:   Boomi, Clickability and Marketo
Website:               www.zuora.com
Blog:                     Z-blog

Recent News:

Zuora Introduces the Business Cloud With Launch of the Z-Commerce Platform

Zuora Enables Growth, Reduces Time to Invoice and Increases Productivity at Marketsync
 

I asked Gary Hagmueller, Zuora’s Chief Financial Officer a few questions about his business and his view of the SaaS market in 2009.
 

Why did you start your company? 

Thanks to the power of the Internet and cloud computing, many products are moving to subscription services delivered online—everything from music and DVDs to software and infrastructure to groceries and cars.
 
However, companies that deliver these new services need a way to run their subscription business AND support their unique billing needs. For example, they need pricing flexibility to address different customer groups, operational scalability for growth, and key metrics like churn and monthly recurring revenue (MRR) to assess the health of the business.
 
That’s where Zuora comes in. Just as Amazon makes it easy to become an online retailer, Google makes it easy for anyone to advertise online, and PayPal makes it easy to accept online payments, Zuora’s vision is to make it easy for any company to build, manage and grow a subscription business.
 
Did Zuora start out as a Software-as-a-Service company?
Yes- Zuora was built from the ground up by SaaS industry visionaries and veterans from Salesforce.com, WebEx, Postini (now Google), and Oracle. The Zuora team grew up in the subscription services world and started Zuora with the mission in mind to help other SaaS companies build and grow. Moreover, Zuora runs its business completely in the cloud, using such applications as WebEx, eFax and Google.
 

Why do customers buy from Zuora?
Zuora is the fastest-growing on-demand subscription billing and payment service designed specifically for subscription companies. Its innovative products are able to meet a wide range of customer problems. Whether a company is having trouble processing recurring payments or spending too much time and resources of manual billing, Zuora’s team can understand and assess the issue. The Zuora platform changes the way subscription businesses manage and sell to customers and allows them to bring new products to market in less time, with less hassle.
 
What do you see as the key trend emerging in the SaaS industry?
In the current economic climate, an increasing number of companies will begin offering their products as subscription services. The success of the SaaS movement has even prompted other industries outside of software like cars and movies (i.e Zipcar and Netflix) to adopt this lucrative model of recurring revenue. The problem is…running a subscription business like salesforce.com or WebEx is hard no matter how the economy is doing, and mastering the metrics of a subscription business is even harder.
 
A key trend emerging is the Business Cloud, any easy way to add commerce capabilities such as subscription billing and recurring payments to the services that developers are building. More and more companies will be looking for a set of cloud-based services dedicated to giving them the tools they need to monetize the services that they are building on cloud platforms.
 

What is your outlook for 2009?

Our outlook for 2009 is extremely bright. The demand for our subscription billing and payment services are expected to grow, particularly in this economic environment, when businesses get lean and mean, regain focus on building differentiation in their core business, and divest non-core activities or outsource them to best of breed vendors like Zuora.

Thank you to Gary Hagmueller, Annette Giambroni and K.V. Rao for contributing to this profile.