Subscription billing company Zuora has just announced a solution for the cloud-computing companies to meter, price and bill their growing solution suites. Called Z-Commerce for the Cloud, the solution is designed to help address the changing game for cloud computing, enabling a flexible, pay-for-what-you-use model, or all you can eat, or pay as you go — whatever enterprise customers are demanding.
Ultimately, for cloud computing to be successful, Zuora says it will need an entirely new billing/commerce engine, with the next six months critical as the competition moves to a fluid battle over pricing and packaging. Zuora is launching what it calls the first online commerce solution for the cloud, based on the company’s development work over the last year with cloud leaders, including Sun, EMC and VMWare.
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, said Zuora.
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. Zuora says Z-Commerce for the Cloud fills this gap.
“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.”
