Zuora and Salesforce in Pact
Zuora and Salesforce.com announced today a new offering that highlights the strengths of each company and delivers new functionality to the telecommunications industry. Zuora for the Communications Industry is a solution based on the Force.com platform that handles billing, payments and customer care for telco and related industries’ customers.
This makes a lot of sense and, as often happens with Zuora, I am scratching my head wondering why I didn’t think of this. Here are what I consider the highlights.
First, there’s billing and payment for subscriptions with emphasis on the special customer relationship that is defined by a subscription. Subscribers are free to change almost at will. True we’re usually locked into two year contracts for wireless services but that’s a relatively short time and there’s no telling when this model will be vacated in favor of something more fluid. So vendors have to be ready and able to modify the relationship as a customer’s need changes. Often billing systems don’t enable enough of this because they’re mired in a paradigm — and a system — that assumes customers are on board for life, or at least decades. This presents a disruption opportunity for subscription billing providers.
Equally important, this relationship also does a lot to redefine an important aspect of CRM. Over the last few years — in concert with the social revolutions — the contact center function has been deconstructed into two constituent parts that had always been thought of together — service and support.
I think of support as helping a customer with a technical issue related to product use. Trouble shooting. Can you help me fix it? And the like. Social channels have become increasingly popular for peer-to-peer support — customers helping customers. Increasingly, support is now done through Twitter, Facebook, email and other community oriented solutions like the Salesforce Service Cloud and Lithium in a peer-to-peer setting today.
Enterprising customers even make video of service issue fixes and post them on YouTube. In fact, YouTube is so popular that it’s now the number-two search engine. Of course YouTube is not a search engine, people just use it that way and that’s the point. Support is being taken out of the vendors’ hands because customers can do it better, cheaper and faster. Vendors aren’t complaining.
Service is another matter. I think of service as the irreducible part of the vendor-customer relationship where you have to interact on some level. You can only go to the vendor when you have a billing dispute or other issue related to the core of the relationship, a peer relationship won’t do much good. Today’s announcement of a new relationship between Salesforce and Zuora makes that clear and the combination of billing, payments and customer service is spot on.
The idea has legs and telcos around the world are already jumping on board. The initial customer base includes communications vendors from several countries and continents including Canada, (Barrett Xplore) The U.S. (Open Range) and Australia (Macquarie).
This is a significant announcement for Zuora, which recently opened up its European offices, because it defines a new market and positions Zuora very nicely in the catbird seat in this market. It’s important for Salesforce too. Historically, a company like Salesforce has grown by acquisition and by extending product lines. This announcement is more of a product line extension but it’s done through developing partnerships for its existing products. Like last week’s announcement of a partnership with Intuit, Salesforce is developing new channels for its existing product as well as new ways to access them for minimal investment.
I expect to see more of this. In fact, and this is only my hypothesis, last week’s activities might offer an additional insight or market signal. Salesforce bought Radian6 for $326 million showing, as it has before, that it will buy a company for strategic advantage. Radian6 is the category leader in social media monitoring and related things and Salesforce scooped it up to bolster its position.
The same could happen with Zuora if billing and telco service becomes strategic enough and there are some interesting reasons to consider this idea. First, we’re in the beginning or middle of a replacement cycle. Client-server call center systems have exceeded their useful lives and can be replaced by a new generation of SaaS based, socialized solutions that are significantly less expensive to own and operate. Also, ten plus years ago, the wireless industry was very different and VoIP was a dream. These and other factors are potential drivers for the Zuora-Salesforce coalition.
Finally, and this has to be said, Zuora’s CEO and co-founder was one of the earliest members of the Benioff team. Tien Tzuo is a smart guy and a strategic thinker and he’s proven his chops at Salesforce and now Zuora. Zuora’s platform is Force.com too. Lastly, Marc Benioff has a personal investment in Zuora having provided some early cash. All those stars are aligned, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. It is enough to say that the Zuora-Salesforce alliance makes sense for present reasons. We need to see how the market reacts.
Oracle Open World Preview
Oracle Open World opens up on Sunday with a keynote at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The annual convention will attract about forty thousand people to the Bay area and promises to be exciting and interesting on multiple levels.
This will be the first Open World post Oracle’s acquisition of computer pioneer Sun Microsystems. Last year Oracle introduced a version of its Exadata storage unit based on Sun architecture (and presumptive deal close) and with the company finally in the fold you can bet there will be more product announcements that mix hardware and system software.
I don’t know if there will be net new announcements, but Sun was the driver of the Java revolution and reduced instruction set computing among other things, so I think it’s way safe to say there will be interesting things coming out of that camp.
This is also the first year post limited release of Oracle’s Fusion architecture. Fusion, you may recall, is a platform intended to unify the many disparate applications that Oracle bought up a few years ago. It is also the platform for merging and rebuilding applications along a more or less consistent Oracle product direction. With another year of development and roll out of Fusion, there will be much more to discuss and announce next week.
There’s also cloud computing to consider. A little over a year ago Larry Ellison was caught on tape at the Churchill Club pooh-poohing cloud computing but that was before Oracle really had a dog, a pack actually, in the hunt. Now that Oracle is better positioned, and given that Oracle’s database and servers support so much of cloud computing, look for Oracle to claim credit for the sunrise — to paraphrase an old Bill Clinton line.
Then, too, you can expect the usual shenanigans from a whole host of characters and partners. Everyone in this business today is into coopetition so look for fun announcements from Dell, HP (we want our secrets back) and Salesforce.com for starters.
Speaking of Salesforce, back by popular demand (or whatever) Marc Benioff will again address a crowd at the Yerba Buena Theater just down the street from the conference. Last year’s inaugural talk was expected to be some kind of challenge to Oracle but turned out to be a very successful symbiotic and statesman-like address. Too bad too because we all waited outside in the rain for the doors to open expecting something more combustible. This year, I hope it’s a sunny day.
On the CRM front, Anthony Lye and company have been working hard all year (Sounds like Christmas and the North Pole, doesn’t it?) to advance the front office suite on multiple fronts. The CRM team has scheduled two hundred sessions for the conference just on CRM. Forget the database, Java and Sun, if you’re into CRM the conference will have you drinking from a fire hose.
Trying to register for sessions is a Byzantine process though, which uses an on-line system that looks like it was built by monkeys on crack. To keep my sanity I have decided not to register for anything but to simply show up. I have a hard copy schedule. I know this strategy might exclude me from a few popular sessions but I figure that’s what beers are for.
The real star of the show, for me, will be the city of San Francisco. It’s not a perfect place for sure, but there is a wonderful energy in the city any time and it’s triply true during Open World and Dreamforce. You walk around high on the possibilities uncovered in the sessions and accented by the environment — the hills, the cable cars, the fog, the restaurants and most importantly the indefatigably optimistic crowd of natives and visitors. Did I mention the California wines?
I digress. One week till Open World. I don’t know what will be announced because I won’t get briefed till later and then I’ll be in quarantine. So, I don’t know any more than you. But I can’t wait.
