Live from the Stanford AlwaysOn Summit

by Tien Tzuo

 

I was thrilled to have the opportunity to speak on the “Will the next salesforce.com please stand up” panel this morning. After the session I was thinking about how great it is to be among those on the cutting edge of the SaaS industry when it struck me, it’s more than just needing the next salesforce.com we need the next 100 salesforce.com’s. Our SaaS industry is at a critical juncture, and we need to see many, many SaaS businesses at scale to validate our nascent industry.

 

In many ways that’s what inspired us to start Zuora — to provide the tools that make it easier for companies to build and scale SaaS businesses. As it turns out, we learned at salesforce.com and WebEx that running a subscription based business is hard. It’s hard to get your pricing and packaging right, it’s hard to handle subscription change orders like adding new licenses, it’s hard to get at metrics like MRR that you need, and it’s hard to scale the business. Hopefully that’s starting to change. At Zuora, we’re building a subscription billing platform designed specifically for the SaaS business, and hopefully we’ll start seeing many more tools that will help break down the barriers for all SaaS companies to become the next salesforce.com

 

To view the “Will the next salesforce.com please stand up” session in its entirety click here

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