Zuora's #Subscribed15 Shows How Organizations Can Power Their Digital Transformation Initiatives

• Delivery of new features to the core Z-Business offering. On stage during the product keynote for Day 2, Guillaume Vives, SVP of Products and Marketing, announced enhancements to the Z-Business platform, Spotlight, and RBM Connect.   New features in the Z-Business offering include the ability to ramp deals, enable multi-action orders, support suspend and resume situations, support new payment gateways across Europe, and configure payment retries.  Spotlight, the reporting solution, adds a new report builder, more best practice template reports, and collaboration features to share with team members. In RBM Connect, the Zuora marketplace, users gain access to a community of developers and technology partners with over 89 applications and integrations
  
  Point of View (POV): Over the past seven years, Zuora has delivered 75 product releases addressing the core subscription economy. The current engine plays a key role in driving the components required to win in digital business.  The system supports the post-sale requirements and addresses the on-demand challenges that most billing systems miss.  Hence, commerce, quoting, pricing, billing, payments, revenue recognition, and GL integration are key features required to deliver on brand experience at the smallest unit cost of product and experience.  RBM Connect is a smart play to provide a marketplace for partners and customers to share ideas and solutions.

• Showcase of Z-Insights as the future of Zuora.  Z-Insights, to be launched Fall of 2015, is the foundation behind the customer analytics software to help Zuora’s customers understand their clients and their behaviors.  Key functionality include subscriber identity, subscriber moments, subscriber segments, subscriber triggers, and subscriber dashboard.  Subscriber Identity gives customers the ability to capture subscriber identity by demographics, user counts, social data, account balance, and company data (see Figure 1).  Subscriber Moments brings together a real-time interaction history around events such as new signups, cancellations, accepted offers, tickets filed, etc (see Figure 2).  Subscriber Segments applies analytics to subsets of customers who may have a propensity to convert from freemium to paid, churn, consider an upsell, reduce usage, etc (see Figure 3).  Subscriber Triggers uses email, notifications, alerts, and messages to help improve customer success (see Figure 4).  Subscriber Dashboard delivers a command center and user activity console that can be published to other systems (see Figure 5).
  
  (POV): Fresh off of their March 11, 2015 announcements of triple digital growth and $115M in funding from Wellington Management Company, Blackrock Inc., Azim Premji, and Passport Capital, Zuora made the acquisition of Frontleaf on May 18th, 2015.  Founder and CEO Tom Krackeler will be part of the executive team.  Constellation believes that should Zuora launch this product as described in the fall of 2015, this will create a game changer for users who will be able to build off of insights to create brand new business models.

• Emphasis of Academy as a resource to digital transformation.  Academy is Zuora’s on-line resource guide and learning center as well as a series of programs and workshops designed to help customers move into the world of the subscription economy.   Foundational course titles include The Subscription Pricing Journey, Defining A Winning Subscription Pricing Model, 4 Ways Subscription Subledgers CAn Help YOu Close Your Books, B2B vs B2C Subscription Payment Strategies,  and The Modern CFO from Geek To Guru.  The academy provides courses and guides for topics such as growth and leadership, pricing strategy, customer success, marketing, finance, operations, IT, Connected Devices – IOT, and media.
  
  (POV): Given that most of Zuora’s customers are Market Leaders and Fast Followers, the course provide a good reference base for the cautious adopters learning how to enter the subscription economy.  In general, prospects and customers should start with the Subscription Economy 101 guides and them move up.  The course ware does vary in quality but most do provide key concepts and good examples of how to get started and succeed.

Figure 6. The FlickrStream From Subscribed 2015

The Bottom Line: Zuora Customers Represent The Disruptors of Digital Business