Congratulations, It’s Over, What’s Next?
Forbes has an interesting post by Tien Tzuo, CEO of Zuora and one of the leaders of the subscription revolution in which he discusses the coming of age of the subscription economy. Coming of age might sound like a contradiction to say the least—where has everyone been for the last couple of decades? Subscriptions are […]
Subscribed 2015
There is no better company to look at to get a sense of the future of technology in business and society than Zuora. This might surprise many people because companies like Oracle, Microsoft, and Salesforce might come to mind more readily. To one degree or another those companies feature their products and services, which are […]
Zuora Pads Its War Chest
Zuora announced a funding round worth $115 million today including investors Wellington Management Co., BlackRock, Premji, and Passport Capital as well as some investors from earlier rounds. Calling it a mini-IPO, CEO Tien Tzuo said the company will behave more like a public company from now on as we await the inevitable reality of an IPO. […]
A Sub-Ledger for the Hybrid Enterprise
There is a business problem that comes up in the life of every company and these days, it seems that a lot of companies face it at once. It’s the question of how to transition from one business model to another without clobbering your current revenue flow. Even if a company’s executives really want to […]
The Subscription Culture
I have been writing about the subscription economy for five years and I have enjoyed my ringside seat following this latest and most important disruption of our time. The subscription business model, and not CRM per se, is the disruption that got Salesforce going and changed the front office software industry entirely. Today we’re well […]
Zuora User Meeting
Believe it or not some things that happened in San Francisco last week had little to do with Dreamforce. Amazing that I’m just getting to that now. Some vendors in the Salesforce ecosystem used the proximity of mutual customers to hold their own user meetings and if they weren’t exactly meetings within meetings, they were […]
The Subscription Model’s Role in the Economy
Recent economic news is lousy. The Eurozone can’t seem to decide on the fundamental question the robber asked, “Your money or your life?” and indecision is cascading across the globe in the form of slow or no growth. It’s as if we’re choosing slow death, boiling our own frog. Unemployment rates are either high or […]
(There’s No) Accounting for the Subscription Economy
You may remember the subscription economy from previous posts. It’s one way to make sense of cloud computing and the many new and very different ways of doing business on the Internet. We’re most familiar with software as a service and how different it is from conventional licenses; so familiar in fact that I don’t […]
2011 Say Bye-bye!
Every year around this time I write two columns one on the year that was and another on what I expect the new year to bring. There is no methodology for this process and I believe this lack of method is important. I take a blank screen and fill it up with what has been […]
The Subscription Imperative Revisited
As often happens in evolutionary systems, availability precedes demand. That’s a complicated way to say that we build products then figure out what they’re good for. It’s not that innovators develop things willy-nilly, but no matter how well thought out an innovation is, the marketplace has the last word on its utility. When we speak […]
