Kudos for Zuora

On demand billing and payments company, Zuora, has been named the OnDemand 100 Company of the Year by AlwaysOn, a Silicon Valley web property that tracks activities in emerging companies. As you know if you’ve been here before, Zuora was one of the earliest movers in the market for on demand billing services for companies [...]

Salesforce Ecosystems Grows

You can gauge the success and financial health of almost any company by looking at revenues.  At least this is true in the short term.  Since revenue is a lagging indicator — with the exception of monthly recurring revenue (MRR) that subscription companies measure — it only tells you where you’ve been not where you [...]

(There’s No) Accounting for the Subscription Economy

You may remember the subscription economy from previous posts.  It’s one way to make sense of cloud computing and the many new and very different ways of doing business on the Internet.  We’re most familiar with software as a service and how different it is from conventional licenses; so familiar in fact that I don’t [...]

Venture Outlook Bullish on Cloud, Enterprise Startups

I was hoping to save this idea for either a year-end story or something focusing on the new year but events seem to have a mind of their own.  The story, whenever it would be issued, would go something like this: Enterprises are picking up more cloud computing solutions and as they do there is [...]

ERP’s Disruptive Moment

At Dreamforce Zuora, like many other emerging companies allied with Salesforce.com, decided to hold a user group meeting.  As long as the customers jointly held by Salesforce and Zuora were in town the logic went, why not have them in for a day of education, listening and a pep talk form the boss. It was [...]

End of the On-Prem Paradigm

Uber analyst Dennis Howlett over at ZDNet wrote a piece ruminating on the Gartner Symposium and colleague Larry Dignan’s summary of the meeting, “Enterprise IT: Here comes that deer in the headlights look again” that is well worth reading.  Together the articles wonder aloud how much time there is between now and the paradigm shift that will [...]

ERP Is Dead — Zuora Chief Says

Is CRM far behind? There was brisk business in associated user group meetings in San Francisco before Dreamforce.  For some reason I don’t understand Dreamforce starts in the middle of the week this year which is fortunate for two reasons.  Huricane Irene clobbered travel operations up and down the east coast over the weekend and [...]

The Subscription Imperative Revisited

As often happens in evolutionary systems, availability precedes demand.  That’s a complicated way to say that we build products then figure out what they’re good for.  It’s not that innovators develop things willy-nilly, but no matter how well thought out an innovation is, the marketplace has the last word on its utility.  When we speak [...]

Zuora and NetSuite in Best-of-Breed Alliance

Yesterday Zuora, the billing and payment solution company for subscription businesses did a smart thing, at least I think so.  At NetSuite’s user meeting, SuiteWorld, Zuora chief Tien Tzuo announced that his trademark product is now pre-integrated with NetSuite’s financials.  But that wasn’t what’s smart, only the thing that enabled the thing that is smart. [...]

Subscription Economy Going Viral

We talk a lot about the cost of gasoline these days.  With prices pushing to the $4/gallon level it’s white knuckle time as we watch to see how the economy will react — and with good reason.  The economic stagnation of the 1970’s was due in part to the rise in fuel prices and the [...]