Zuora offers Online Subscription Billing System “Z Payments”
By Azam on October 7, 2008 
Zuora is offering a simple payment billing system for online subscription services. The service allows companies to focus on their products and services and outsource billing system to Zuora. The services provide a billing solution beyond simple send out payments and handle the billing cycle and issues that arise in billing. The company recently announced product launch dubbed “Z-payments”
From VentureBeat
While Zuora’s first product, Z-Billing, automates the billing process (duh), Z-Payments handles the other side of the equation — actually allowing customers to pay those bills, including integration with online payment service PayPal.
The product addresses a common complaint among Zuora customers, says chief executive Tien Tzuo — billing customers isn’t always enough. There are always people who don’t pay, or payments that don’t go through, and companies often lack the staff to deal with every one of those problems.
“The net effect is they end up not collecting all the money they can collect,” Tien Tzuo says.
Zuroa is founded form a team an experienced from Salesfore and Webex. Tzuo left Salesforce to found Zuora to deliver billing system for online services subscription firms. Like Salesforces, Zuora offers the service through an online subscription (SaaS) model. Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, is an investor in Zuora.
Portal Software (Oracle) is the main established player in the field of billing software for enterprise level that serves subscription services. Like enterprise software model that requires large upfront license, implementation, and customization costs make the software prohibitively expensive for smaller firms. Salesforce has proven the model (SaaS) works and serves the enterprise effectively: also, firms have benefited with the ability to lower costs associated with large enterprise software.
Zuora should benefit from the increasing trend and acceptance of online subscription model (SaaS). Firms offering online subscriptions will benefit from a familiar and similar billing subscription service model. The company has plans for other products and features to make handling subscriptions easier, and is also developing a module for Salesforce’s Force.com platform.
Zuora launched earlier this year and has since signed up more than 40 customers. It raised $6.5 million from Benchmark Capital and from Benioff.
Categories : TechTags : Benchmark Capital, Marc Benioff, online subscription billing system, Portal Software, SaaS, Salesforce, Tien Tzuo, z-payments, Zuroa