Continuing our story on Zuora, visitors to Zuora’s Redwood City offices may be surprised to learn the company doesn’t have its own data center. In fact, it doesn’t own a single server or have an IT department. All development work is hosted by CVSDude, with Zuora using Amazon's Web Services for additional processing power and storage as needed.
Instead of Microsoft Office, each employee runs Google applications hosted on the search leader’s cloud. As you might expect, the company uses salesforce.com for CRM and other internal collaborative applications. Mr. Tzuo told me he also serves as the salesforce administrator. (Note: he also uses other cloud services for fax servers, marketing support, and other functions.)
Zuora makes the sign of the Z
Force.com allows Zuora to add billing and payment functionality to salesforce’s more than 51,800 customers. Here’s how it could work: Imagine you’ve started a new car-sharing company to compete with Zipcar. You could use salesforce.com’s software to run a public website and track all customer interactions. Your customers could select the type of subscription plan they want (based on hours per week or month, type of car, or duration of use) and preferred payment plan (debit from a bank account, charge to a credit card, or link to PayPal) using Z-Force.
Last week, Zuora unveiled its new Z-Commerce Platform aimed at software developers. It allows them to access the current Z-apps and adds a SubcribeNow feature for one-click ordering. Like other development networks, it has a sandbox with sample code and tool kits, developer community/forum, reference client web store with full source code, and online documentation of the application programming interfaces (APIs).
Curious about no servers, no CIO…yet continuous innovation?
While it’s hard to imagine Zuora signing up more than a handful of the Fortune 500 companies that dominate our client base, we think it’s important to share with you some of the innovation happening behind the scenes in Silicon Valley.
Are you interested in learning more about running your business in the clouds? Are you thinking of starting a new venture built on cloud services? Would you like to participate in an AMR Research webcast with Tien? Please let me know.
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