Join Alvina Antar, CIO at Zuora and other IT leaders at our upcoming Subscribed conference April 12-13, 2016 in San Francisco. This is an unique opportunity to learn everything you need to know about The New IT – we’ll cover everything from being your best reference account to unveiling SaaS reference architectures with speakers from Dell, Pivotal, New Relic, Box, Carbonite and more. You don’t want to miss this – register today!
Excerpts from Subscription Services Make you Reconsider ERP by Alvina Antar (first published on Cioreview.com)
As your business transforms, so should your technology. You should take a hard look at your existing end-to-end architecture to determine if you are positioned to meet your business strategy. As your company pivots and transforms, so should you. You need to realize the capability gaps that prevent you from supporting your business’ growth. When the existing quote to cash architecture is not able to support new product (or service) launch, it is time to supplement your investments to align with your go-to-market strategy.
High-tech, Media & Telecom and IoT industries are shifting from traditional pay-per-product (or service) to subscription-based recurring revenue models. This shift is not designed or supported by Oracle and SAP. With most ERP systems, the transaction ends with the sale – there’s no relationship beyond the sale. Legacy ERP systems lack the ability to monetize ongoing customer relationships. Rigid ERPs are unable to manage complex use-cases like cross-sells, up-sells, timed promotions and constant price adjustments. The hard reality is that you need to design a new quote-to-cash architecture to join the ‘Subscription Economy’.
The Power of Investing in your own technology
Last year, I committed to advancing the use of our own technology, ‘Zuora on Zuora’ – a strategic program designed to become our best reference account. As an ideal SaaS customer of our product, the IT team initiated an internal sales cycle, defined the value assessment with executive sponsors, developed a design blueprint and deployed successfully. The business objectives enable speed, scale and customer success by fully utilizing Zuora’s software for recurring billing, payment, and analytics. This has served as an unbiased eye of a customer, providing feedback with priorities to product and engineering and becoming a trusted CIO-to-CIO reference.
‘Zuora on Zuora’ has created significant business value by internalizing our customer’s experience. Seeing how the product is used in real-time has benefitted the entire company. We have a direct, unfiltered view of usage patterns, requirements and performance and our own testbed for alpha releases – customer zero. What better sales tool than an incredibly successful implementation of your own product!
Learn more at the Subscribed conference session ‘Be Your Best Reference Account’ where Alvina Antar, CIO at Zuora and Yvonne Wassenaar, CIO at New Relic will discuss why it’s a must for IT teams today to internalize your customer’s experience and provide direct value to your Product, Engineering and Sales teams. Check out other sessions in The New IT track here.
Don’t miss this valuable track dedicated to IT leaders, architects and engineers at Subscribed ‘16 –register today! (Only $399 before March 13th for you and a friend with the promo code ZUORA241)
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