SAN MATEO, CA--(Marketwired - Mar 15, 2017) - Zuora, Inc., the leading provider of subscription commerce, billing and finance solutions, today released a new developer center and added 30 new must-have applications to Zuora® Connect, bringing the marketplace total to nearly 100 available apps. Zuora Connect is the most expansive collection of apps that delivers extensibility and customization to the Zuora subscription management platform. Zuora Connect is leveraged by the world's largest global enterprises including Schneider Electric, CLEAR and NCR.
"Zuora Connect allows enterprises to rapidly innovate and precisely tailor their subscription infrastructure to meet the unique demands of their subscribers," said Tom Krackeler, SVP Product at Zuora. "Our growing ecosystem of partners and applications gives our customers access to continuous subscription management innovation and a competitive advantage to monetize any service."
Zuora built the Connect app marketplace to give subscription businesses access to innovation from across the Zuora ecosystem so that each business can tailor their own systems for success within the Subscription Economy®. Connect integrates into the Zuora subscription management platform which currently enables more than 800 companies to design new pricing models; automate downstream billing, payments, and revenue recognition based on subscription charges; and run the business based on industry standard, customer-centric subscription metrics.
"A subscription platform that can interconnect applications to meet the business process requirements is important to maximize efficiency and the resulting experience for customers," said Mark Smith, CEO and Chief Research Officer at Ventana Research. "Zuora Connect helps ensure the order-to-cash process is interconnected across the enterprise and can rapidly plug into applications and systems without excessive spending on resources or developers."
New Zuora Connect Applications
The Connect marketplace features a new developer site and nearly 100 apps created specifically for subscription businesses including quoting, financial operations, data ingestion, e-signatures and ERP integrations. The apps are built to solve real-world use cases, such as lockbox file processing, custom dunning workflows, discount management rules, and more. All apps are built by Zuora and its customers and ISV partners, and are hosted on the Zuora platform.
New to Zuora Connect are lockbox synchronizations with banks (Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Bank of the West, Commonwealth Bank, City National Bank, Harris Bank), and connectors to data providers (ProfitWell Visualization Dashboard, Amplitude, MailChimp, Mixpanel, WhatCounts, Zendesk), app stores (Amazon and Apple), and tax management solutions (Sabrix, Vertex and CCH). Five of the most often used Connect applications are:
- Collections Manager: Creates workflows for dunning and invoice collections processes. Automatically suspend, cancel, and/or resume any customer subscriptions, and send email and SMS notifications.
- Advanced Payment Retry: Minimizes revenue leakage by orchestrating retry rules and actions targeting the root cause of the decline for millions of failed credit card payments at a time.
- Developer Tools: Onboards new customers and performs migrations and updates en masse with API loaders that save time and improve the subscription experience of customers.
- Promo Codes: Automates and manages millions of promotion codes without manual intervention. Simplify the customer checkout process with coupons, promotions and incentives.
- Price Books: Simplify the pricing process by integrating to the Zuora product catalog and centralizing pricing maintenance.
Zuora Connect Customers
"As one of the largest technology providers for the financial, retail and hospitality industries, our subscription business model is imperative in delivering best-in-class software that enables Omni-Channel consumer experiences. A new set of systems is required to handle the business demands of our new subscription offerings, and having access to the Zuora Connect marketplace is accelerating the pace at which we are enabling our subscription and SaaS business," said Bill VanCuren, CIO at NCR.
"We are all about our customers; their experience is our first priority and is a key tenet of our brand. At airports, stadiums and soon in retail locations, we are transforming the customer experience by creating a seamless experience for verifying identities and processing transactions," said Ken Cornick, Co-Founder, President and CFO at CLEAR. "Our customers expect that same high level of service when it comes to the management of their membership accounts and this is made possible by Zuora's leading subscription technology and partner ecosystem."
"Zuora Connect offered tools that allowed us to accelerate our payment operations and system management activities. As a chief accounting officer, saving time and maximizing team efficiency is paramount in running a best-in-class enterprise software company," said David Tabachnick, CAO at Autotask Corporation.
"The Zuora Salesforce CPQ Connector is being used by Five9 in our production operations and is the essential glue between our front office and back office operations. It eliminated costly development work we might have had to take on ourselves and saves countless hours for our back office team," said Claus Roggensack, Senior Manager, Business Applications at Five9.
Zuora Connect Partners
Distribution and development of critical subscription business applications are critical to the bottom line and customer satisfaction. Zuora has invested significantly in the security and support of Zuora Connect. Partners developing new apps or customizing existing apps on the platform will benefit from:
- Security and compliance: The Connect Platform is SOC 1 Type 1 and SOC 2 Type 1 compliant.
- Ease of upgrades: Nothing to install, zero down time, and backwards compatible.
- Open framework: Developer site complete with app builder starter pack, Connect GEM and a community board to enable rapid app development by 3rd parties; written in Ruby with full REST API coverage.
- Global support: The service of Zuora's award-winning Global Support team.
- Partner on-boarding program: Enablement process ensures success for vendors that want to build and host apps on the Zuora Platform.
- Monetization models: A monetization framework for partners and developers available to help them generate revenue from apps featured in Zuora Connect.
"As subscription businesses launch new services and expand globally into new markets, the complexity and need to support a wider-array of payment options increases rapidly," said Andre Machicao, SVP of CyberSource at Visa. "Our pre-built integration to Zuora, featured on the Zuora Connect marketplace, allows us to more effectively reach and support the fast-growth companies and established global enterprises using Zuora that need to mitigate fraud and secure their payment data."
"The Zuora Connect app starter kit, open platform, and partner on-boarding process have made it very easy for us to build a number of integrations for our joint customers," said Patrick Campbell, Co-founder and CEO at Price Intelligently. "We are thrilled to showcase the apps for our ProfitWell and ProfitWell Retain products in the Zuora Connect marketplace, in particular the Profitwell Visualization Dashboard app, and we look forward to collaborating with Zuora to deliver value-add solutions to the Subscription Economy."
Additional Resources
About Zuora Connect
"The Subscription Economy: A Business Transformation" by Tien Tzuo, CEO of Zuora
SlideShare: "Drivers of Success in the Subscription Economy"
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@Zuora
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About Zuora, Inc.
Zuora is a SaaS company and the world's foremost evangelist of the Subscription Economy®. Zuora's leading subscription management platform helps enable businesses in any industry to launch or shift products to subscription, implement new pay-as-you-go pricing and packaging models, gain new insights into subscriber behavior, open new revenue streams, and disrupt market segments to gain competitive advantage. Zuora serves more than 800 companies around the world in every industry including Box, Komatsu, Rogers, Schneider Electric, Toshiba, Xplornet and Zendesk. The Subscription Economy Index (SEI) demonstrates that SEI companies are growing revenues approximately nine times faster than the S&P 500. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Zuora also operates offices in Atlanta, Boston, Denver, San Francisco, London, Paris, Beijing, Sydney and Tokyo.
© 2017 Zuora, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Zuora, Subscribed and Subscription Economy are trademarks of Zuora, Inc. Third party trademarks mentioned above are owned by their respective companies. Nothing in this press release should be construed to the contrary, or as an approval, endorsement or sponsorship by any third parties of Zuora, Inc. or any aspect of this press release. To learn more about the Zuora platform, please visit www.zuora.com.
