
Subscription Time at The Financial Times
Zuora, the subscription billing and payments company and the Financial Times of London announced a deal today in which the Times will use Zuora to help manage its subscription business. Two interesting paragraphs from an article in Computerworld UK stand out: “The organisation has invested heavily in its digital strategy in recent years amidst a […]

Zuora Swings for the Fences
Tien Tzuo, CEO of Zuora, gave the speech of his life a few days ago, one that Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft should study for its content if not its style. Tzuo’s company Zuora, started the subscription billing market back when billing was a big and the only deal that SaaS and other subscription companies […]

The Box S-1, Delayed IPO, and the Genius of Tien Tzuo
While I did my own post on the Box S-1, I also noticed that fellow CEO blogger, Tien Tzuo of Zuora, had done a post of his own with the catchy title These Numbers Show That Box CEO Aaron Levie is a Genius. I saw the post, clipped it to Evernote, and I decided to read […]

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 […]

Teeing Up Aviso
A couple of industry heavy weights have pooled their talents and assembled $8 million in funding resources to launch Aviso, a new kind of analytics company this week. K.V. Rao, co-founder and CEO, and Andrew Abrahams, co-founder and CTO, are Ph.D. scientists taking on risk assessment for modern enterprises. Rao, has a string of successful […]

Back Office Perks Up
What’s going on in the back office? That normally staid bastion of conventional computing is perking up taking on subscriptions and cloud computing like candy. It used to be that when you thought about back office and cloud in the same thought you also thought about NetSuite. Truthfully you still do, they’ve been at it […]

Zuora, Intacct Deal a Sign of Things to Come
We’re beginning to see an important differentiation, even a schism, in the enterprise software industry. It’s been building up for the last seven years and it will burst onto the scene tied in a bow this year. It’s the separation between conventional software suites and platforms and it is most vividly explained by front to […]

The Year Ahead
I’d like to say it’s going to be a good year in CRM and I firmly believe it, though I can’t offer a single all encompassing reason for my optimism though there are plenty of small things that begin to add up. In an earlier time the metaphor might have been “straws in the wind.” […]

Dreamforce 2013: You don’t have to blow things up to be explosive
Overview I’ve been going to Dreamforce, salesforce.com’s big annual shindig for many years, and for many years, I’ve seen the same thing over and over. And no, that’s not what a party! Which it is. It’s not oh, whoa, another big, big event. Which it is. It’s not, another amazing work of presentation art. Which […]

Get a Horse
I was literally gobsmacked and I had to re-read the post several times. Gartner analyst Robert Desisto—who I don’t know at all—wrote a short post last week saying that today’s SaaS vendors, “will resist to the move to ‘pay as you go’ because it will have a very big impact on their business model predictability” […]