current situation
Current Situation
Before Zuora
Tien Tzuo was the chief strategy officer at Salesforce.com and K.V. Rao was head of strategic marketing and business development at WebEx. Both Tien Tzuo and K.V. Rao worked on building their respective billing solutions that was a big barrier to many SaaS companies. Once realized that this is a huge unaddressed problem for SaaS companies, they saw this an opportunity to exploit this new e-commerce niche in the SaaS Industry, thus creating Zuora. Cheng Zhou, the head of Bliss joined them and they were able to obtain $6.5 million start-up investment from Benchmark, a venture capital company, and Benioff, Tien Tzuo’s former boss, the founder of Salesforce.com
Analysis of Zuora Inc as a business
Tien Tzuo and K.V. Rao founded Zuora to address the need for billing efficiency. They are aware that there’s an increase in products being offered as a subscription service (i.e. Netflix offering a monthly subscription for a library of shows and movies, Zipcar offering a pay as-you-go utility that eliminates the need to buy cars etc). Their vision is to provide an e-commerce platform that provides a low-cost, state-of-the-art and highly efficient billing systems. Before the launch of their billing module, they tested their program to 5 alpha customers. Their feedback caused Zuora to create a payment module that handles payments, and signed a partnership contract with PayPal. With their launch in October 2008, their Z-billing product sold to over 70 customers. In January 2010, Zuora released another product, Z-commerce, a billing platform aimed towards cloud developers
What is wrong?
Zuora currently faces the following threats:
• The rise of Cloud Computing
• Offline Subscription of Zuora’s current services offered by their competitors such as AT&T or Zipcar
• Given the constant change in the market dynamics of the technology industry, Zuora must be able to ‘quick think’ of opportunities in order to strengthen its current position as a
Before Zuora
Tien Tzuo was the chief strategy officer at Salesforce.com and K.V. Rao was head of strategic marketing and business development at WebEx. Both Tien Tzuo and K.V. Rao worked on building their respective billing solutions that was a big barrier to many SaaS companies. Once realized that this is a huge unaddressed problem for SaaS companies, they saw this an opportunity to exploit this new e-commerce niche in the SaaS Industry, thus creating Zuora. Cheng Zhou, the head of Bliss joined them and they were able to obtain $6.5 million start-up investment from Benchmark, a venture capital company, and Benioff, Tien Tzuo’s former boss, the founder of Salesforce.com
Analysis of Zuora Inc as a business
Tien Tzuo and K.V. Rao founded Zuora to address the need for billing efficiency. They are aware that there’s an increase in products being offered as a subscription service (i.e. Netflix offering a monthly subscription for a library of shows and movies, Zipcar offering a pay as-you-go utility that eliminates the need to buy cars etc). Their vision is to provide an e-commerce platform that provides a low-cost, state-of-the-art and highly efficient billing systems. Before the launch of their billing module, they tested their program to 5 alpha customers. Their feedback caused Zuora to create a payment module that handles payments, and signed a partnership contract with PayPal. With their launch in October 2008, their Z-billing product sold to over 70 customers. In January 2010, Zuora released another product, Z-commerce, a billing platform aimed towards cloud developers
What is wrong?
Zuora currently faces the following threats:
• The rise of Cloud Computing
• Offline Subscription of Zuora’s current services offered by their competitors such as AT&T or Zipcar
• Given the constant change in the market dynamics of the technology industry, Zuora must be able to ‘quick think’ of opportunities in order to strengthen its current position as a