Seemingly taking a cue from its 'alma mater', Zuora – the Cloud billing and invoicing firm set up by former Salesforce.com executives and backed by Marc Benioff – has announced the Z-Commerce platform which it's calling “the first development platform dedicated to enabling monetisation for Cloud Computing services”.
Zuora launched its first product, Z-Billing, in May 2008, followed in October by Z-Payments, a payment solution built for subscription businesses and includes the ability to accept PayPal payments. Finally in November 2008, Zuora unveiled Z-Force, the first billing and payment system fully integrated with Salesforce.com and 100% native to the Force.com platform.
The Z-Commerce Platform works with any Cloud Computing platform, including Amazon Web Services, Salesforce.com’s Force.com, and Google AppEngine and offers a number of commerce capabilities to developers, including:
- A complete set of commerce APIs that allow developers to tap into the power of Z-Billing, Z-Payments, and Z-Force;
- ASubscribeNow call that makes it easy to add one-click order processing to any web site;
- Sample code and toolkits for the most popular languages such as Java, .NET, and PHP;
- A developer sandbox environment to use for developing and testing commerce solutions;
- Z-Store reference implementation, a fully functional web store, complete with source code, that takes subscription orders from a web site and allows end customers to manage their subscription and billing information;
- New Zuora Developer Community Site, a community of cloud computing developers sharing best practices and collaborating around the Business Cloud. The site includes forums, developer events, and full developer support.
Zuora argues that the emergence of technology-led Cloud platform strategies is all good and well, but that Cloud developers need to find a way to make money from them. “2009 is the Year of the Cloud – and developers are clearly shifting to building services on cloud platforms. With the Z-Commerce Platform, we’ve now given developers a powerful way to monetize services built on these platforms,” said Tien Tzuo, CEO, Zuora. “This is the most important product announcement we’ve made thus far – with the introduction of the Z-Commerce Platform, we’ve taken a big step towards our vision of being the de-facto commerce engine for the cloud.”
"Payments and billing are two of the thorniest - and critical - business operational elements facing both new and mature SaaS and Cloud vendors," according to Robert Mahowald, director of IDC's global SaaS practice. "By providing a solution to a key pain point that all SaaS and Cloud Computing vendors share, Zuora is helping to drive new opportunities for SaaS-based businesses and to usher in the era of the Business Cloud."
One early adopter is DataDoctors, a chain of computer service centers and a Zuora customer, which used the Z-Commerce platform to build a billing Intranet for its franchisees."Using the Z-Commerce Platform we built a custom billing, payment and subscription management system for our locations to use with subscription customers,” said Brandon Disney, COO, Data Doctors Franchise Systems. “Zuora's open API made it easy to launch an intranet that is now used by our 250+ personnel around the country.”
CVSDude, an international hosting service, has used the platform to add billing and payment capabilities, integrated into its code control service. "With the Z-Commerce Platform we easily added commerce to our subversion hosting and project management service," said Jason Seed, CEO of CVSdude. "Now our invoicing and payment process is fully automated and integrated into our end user experience."
