by Ben Wu

VP, Product Management

Wow, what an exciting year it’s been for the Commerce product line here at Zuora!  Amongst other things, we’ve grown the product development team significantly, introduced new REST APIs (to complement our SOAP APIs and Z-Checkout pages) to make web self-service storefront integrations easier, and topped things off just last week our Titanium release of Zuora for Salesforce, which is now generally available to all of our customers.

I’m thrilled about our latest Titanium release.  It’s really awesome — both in terms of giving sales and service teams more out-of-the-box capabilities to interact more effectively with subscribers and in giving Salesforce admins the tools to make rapid point-and-click customizations to delight those application users.

To recap a bit, we launched Zuora for Salesforce (the product formerly known as Z-Force) in 2008, and there are 3 key modules:

• Quotes: a native Force.com application to enable assisted sales of your subscription products and services
• 360 Sync: providing bi-directional sync of information between Zuora and Salesforce, so sales and service reps always have a fresh view into key subscriber activity and into opportunities that exist to foster deeper customer relationships, and the
• ZDK: a toolkit of custom components, classes and APIs to enable Salesforce admins to build custom subscription flows and use cases.

Today, Zuora and Salesforce share 300+ customers and have maintained a strong partnership. Since 2008, adoption of Zuora for Salesforce has truly been incredible, as evidenced by the number of subscriptions originating from Salesforce into Zuora (over 800,000 in the past year alone), the amount of information being synchronized (over 5.5 billion records), and types of customizations being built by our customers using the ZDK.

Which is why we doubled down this past year with our Titanium release of Zuora for Salesforce.  Broken down, Titanium is really all about two things:

Point-and-click configurability

We kept hearing from Salesforce admins that they wanted us to make configurations easier.  More do-it-yourself.  Without needing IT developers.  Because, point-and-click is what you’ve come to love about the Force.com platform.  Well, what we’ve done here in Titanium is truly a game changer.

More out-of-the-box use cases

With Zuora’s leadership in both subscription pricing and subscriber management capabilities, we wanted to ensure that our Salesforce users always have this functionality at their fingertips.  So, we invested heavily in adding out-of-the-box support for cancellation quotes, enabling credit cards to be securely collected in the quoting flow, making the subscription metrics we surface more robust, and lots more.

We’ve fully componentized our quoting application, more than tripling the number of reusable components that are used across all our out-of-the-box quotes pages.  And, because they leverage the Force.com point-and-click platform, these components are sort of like Legos that can easily be plugged in or swapped out.

So, with just a little tinkering and no IT developers needed, it’s super easy for a Salesforce admin to build custom flows that allow reps to quote faster and more effectively.  From simple changes like hiding fields where reps always accept the default values to complex changes like adding, removing, or rearranging entire pages in the quoting flow.  Customizations impossible in other quoting engines are now point-and-click in Titanium.

Titanium is one of the most significant product releases I’ve seen in my 3+ years at Zuora. And we won’t stop there, so I look forward to having all of you get started with Titanium and to hearing your feedback on what you’d like to see next.

Thanks, and enjoy Titanium!

– Ben Wu