Enabling the Cloud Computing Business Model

• On Thursday Zuora announced the release of Z-Commerce for the Cloud at GigaOM's Structure 2010 event in San Francisco.
• Z-Commerce for the Cloud enables the new business models introduced by cloud computing that enterprise customers now demand. The new solution is the result of 12 months of development with cloud leaders including Cloud Central, EMC, IC&S, Nu-b, Sun, Tata, and Zetta.
• Cloud computing is disrupting the $3.4 trillion technology industry as enterprises move away from owning and maintaining servers to choosing elastic compute clouds. But as the IT world moves to elastic server clouds, a fundamentally different business model is required -- a usage-based, pay-as-you-go business model. Unless cloud vendors can solve the need to meter, price, and bill -- the heart of the new business model -- the cloud will never reach its full potential.
• Until now, the lack of a billing infrastructure for the cloud has made it nearly impossible for many providers to effectively bring their offerings to market. Custom solutions and legacy ERP systems cannot support pricing configurations or frequent changes required to meet diverse and fluid customer requirements. Z-Commerce for the Cloud fills this gap.

Product Capabilities to Meter, Price and Bill

• Z-Commerce for the Cloud enables cloud providers to automate metering, pricing and billing for their full spectrum of products, bundles, and configurations quickly and accurately.
• Zuora enables complete capabilities for managing cloud business models, including:
  • Cloud Units of Measure: charge users per terabyte stored, IP address, gigabyte transferred, CPU instance, application user, and more.
  • Metering Infrastructure Integration: leverage pre-built integration with the metering systems from leading vendors like VMware, Cloud.com, EMC, and others.
  • Over 20 New Cloud Pricing Models: leverage over 20 pre-built cloud charge models, including on demand, reservation, location-based, and off-peak pricing, with the ability to configure much more.
  • Instant Pricing Configuration: support unlimited pricing and packaging configurability, along with the ability to make changes in real-time to adapt to market conditions.
  • Subscription Lifecycle Management: handle the lifecycle complexities of renewals, upgrades, cancellations, and more.
  • Online Z-Store: an online, PCI-compliant storefront that allows customers to make purchases, to manage their accounts, and to monitor usage in a self-service manner.
  • Automated Billing: automatically create itemized, recurring invoices, track payments, and manage the complexities of credit balances, refunds, charge-backs and more.
  • Partner Billing: provide reseller partners with an "in-a-box" solution to bill in the cloud, in addition to billing customers directly.
  • Blueprint for the Cloud: leverage best practices and business model considerations Zuora has accumulated from helping many vendors launch their cloud businesses. The blueprint can be downloaded today at www.zuora.com/cloud.
• Z-Commerce for the Cloud is offered via four editions that address every business and usage model in the Cloud:
  • Service Provider Edition offers service providers the fastest way to get to market, with the flexibility to implement any number of usage-based pricing models.
  • Embedded Edition allows cloud providers to offer Zuora as an "in-a-box" service to any ISV or reseller partners who need their own cloud commerce solution.
  • Marketplace Edition enables cloud vendors to connect buyers and sellers of cloud-based services in an "App Store"-like environment, sharing in the revenues with the app providers.
  • Private Cloud Edition provides a solution for enterprises standing up private clouds to implement charge-backs for transparency and cost allocation.

Industry Leaders and Partners Endorse Zuora's Vision for the Cloud

• Microsoft: "Cloud computing opens up worlds of new opportunity for commerce," said Dianne O'Brien, Senior Director of Business Strategy for Windows Azure. "But in order to seize those opportunities and thrive in this new model, we need commerce systems that enable us to meter, price, and bill for usage in the cloud."
• OpSource: "As a leader in enterprise cloud and managed hosting, we've seen firsthand how important the ability to meter, price and bill is for our customers," says Keao Caindec, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer of OpSource. "Zuora provides a comprehensive on-demand subscription billing solution, and together we offer our customers best-in-class solutions to manage their entire cloud stack from infrastructure to billing."
• Cloud.com: "Zuora's commerce platform instantly enables customers to monetize their Cloud.com deployments," said Sheng Liang, Cloud.com CEO. "By providing customers with a billing and metering platform that matches the usage-based deployment model, Zuora is delivering a critical component for a successful cloud deployment. We are excited to be partnering with the Zuora team as they bring their innovative solution to market."
• Astadia: "As the world's largest pure-play cloud computing systems integrator, Astadia has repeatedly seen how challenging it is for service providers to launch on demand, usage-based cloud business models," says Blake Wolff, Executive Vice President, Astadia. "Z-Commerce for the Cloud solves the fundamental need to meter, price, and bill in the cloud, and we are excited to partner with Zuora to deliver this compelling service to our customers."
• IDC: "For the last decade, there's been a lot of talk about the importance and power of dynamic pricing, but many software companies still struggle with allowing flexibility in pricing and packaging, in part due to archaic back- and front-end systems," said Amy Konary, Director of Software Licensing and Provisioning Research at IDC. "Z-Commerce for the Cloud helps address some of the key operational challenges software companies face, including aspects of metering, pricing and billing."
• Neovise: "In order to succeed, cloud-based businesses must not only deliver compelling value through their technology, but they must also offer new ways of purchasing and consuming that value. This means completely different approaches to packaging, pricing, revenue collection and more," says Paul Burns, President of Neovise. "Z-Commerce for the Cloud is the eCommerce platform that helps commercial cloud service providers deliver and monetize services according to any business model their customers require."
• Beagle Research: "Business models are dramatically different in the cloud," said Denis Pombriant, Founder and Principal Analyst of Beagle Research. "Zuora defined the subscription billing space, making them the right company to launch the first online commerce solution for the cloud, and its solution will enable cloud providers to succeed."

Zuora Cloud Customers Testify to the Impact

• Tata Communications: "With the explosive expansion of cloud computing, Tata Communications needs to partner with a vendor that has proven it can scale to meet significant commercial requirements," said Matt Leonard, IaaS Product Management. "Zuora has the knowledge and flexibility to accommodate creative cloud-based billing for large scale transactions. As we continue to build our cloud offering, Tata Communications must partner with organizations that have the credibility and leadership to accelerate our service to the market. Zuora's ability to meet our rapid go-to-market timelines and its vision for the future of the cloud makes it the ideal partner for Tata Communications."
• BlueLock: "BlueLock looked at several billing solution providers and selected Zuora because of its cleaner API and our shared vision for an intricate usage-based billing for cloud services," said Don Kane, Chief Product Manager at BlueLock, a top VMware vCloud hosting provider. "Zuora was also able to meet our very aggressive implementation timeline."
• Cloud Central: "Cloud Central has created the leading Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud in the Australian market," said Kris Sheather, CTO of Cloud Central. "Cloud Central enables companies of all sizes to deploy public and private clouds rapidly, securely, and cost effectively. We partnered with Zuora because it uniquely enables us to offer pay-as-you-go, usage-based billing that our customers demand."
• IC&S: "Our cloud-over-cloud infrastructure and software management project Jitscale.com services customers worldwide," said Eelco van Beek, CEO of IC&S, a leading European cloud provider. "This is why we use Zuora because it is the clear leader in cloud billing and payments. It enables us to globally bill our customers and to focus even more on the quality and availability of our core services."
• Sun Microsystems: "Cloud Computing is changing our industry," said Lew Tucker, former CTO Cloud Computing, Sun Microsystems. "At Sun Microsystems, we chose Zuora to deliver an entire solution for subscription billing which allowed us to focus on bringing our service to market in record time."
• Zetta: "Zetta chose Zuora because it enabled us to get to market more quickly and to package and price our storage service more flexibly, allowing us to be more agile and responsive to the marketplace and our customers," said Chris Schin, VP Products at Zetta. "Since launching with Zuora, we are able to accept orders and instantly provision storage footprint for our customers."

Zuora Commentary

• "The rise of cloud computing is just another proof point that we're moving to a subscription economy, and evidence of another industry that is facing unique challenges as part of this shift," said Zuora co-founder and CEO Tien Tzuo. "We've spent a full year working with cloud leaders such as EMC and VMware to understand the needs of both cloud providers and their customers. Now, we've delivered a platform with all the metering, pricing, and billing capabilities required for the cloud to fully live up to its promise."