According to a recent Gartner report, global spending on SaaS or cloud application services will grow 20% to reach $46.3 billion in 2017. The resulting rise in subscription economy has benefitted Mountain View, California-based Zuora, which helps companies deal with the billing and pricing complexities involved in running subscription-based businesses.

Photo Credit: Erich Ferdinand/Flickr.com

Zuora’s Offerings

Zuora was founded in 2007 by K.V. Rao, Cheng Zou, and CEO Tien Tzuo, industry veterans from WebEx and Salesforce.com. They were convinced that organizations were migrating to a business model where they would offer services through subscriptions instead of a single-use sale. They wanted to establish Zuora as the platform that could offer an end-to-end subscription management services to help businesses in automating recurring billing and collections, configuring, pricing, and quoting for recurring revenue businesses.

Zuora’s platform is a SaaS solution that addresses the complex issues surrounding subscription billing that were not being addressed by traditional, legacy financial systems. The platform tracks subscription payments, invoices, pricing, product catalogs, and taxation. Its services replace existing invoicing solutions with a subscription service a business model where they would offer services through subscriptions instead of a single-use sale. Zuora’s customers include startups like Box, Marketo, and Zendesk as well as manufacturers such as Schneider Electric and Honeywell.

Zuora is continuing to expand its portfolio. Last year, it released a predictive data product called Zuora Insights that allows its customers to combine financial, demographic, and behavioral data to provide useful insights regarding the customer. The product allows organizations to proactively make use of this data to find issues and understand the customer better.

In May this year, Zuora has announced its plans to buy Leeyo, a leading company in revenue-recognition automation, for an undisclosed price. Leeyo was founded in 2009 to help companies automate their complex revenue accounting and forecasting processes. It has more than 100 customers and 100 employees.