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TerrAvion Goes Live on Zuora’s Subscription Billing Platform in 39 Days

ZUO | March 6, 2019

TerrAvion Goes Live on Zuora’s Subscription Billing Platform in 39 Days

The agriculture imagery company was able to streamline its order-to-revenue process to help farmers increase their crop yields

Zuora, Inc. (NYSE: ZUO), the leading cloud-based subscription management platform provider, today announced its customer TerrAvion went live on the Zuora® Billing platform in 39 days after realizing that "no company should try to build their own billing system," according to Nathan Jayappa, COO of TerrAvion.

Technology unlocks quantifiable value for farmers. According to a study by Goldman Sachs, precision agriculture technologies (autonomous tractors, planting and fertilizer applications, weather data analysis, connected irrigation systems, etc.) have the potential to allow for 70 percent higher yields on existing croplands. That's a remarkable number that translates to a total addressable market of $240 billion USD by 2050.

TerrAvion, whose CEO led the first drone platoon in Afghanistan, deploys sensor-equipped airplanes that give farmers a regular snapshot of all their fields throughout the growing season. The imagery and data that TerrAvion provides allows farmers to identify irrigation, soil, and growth anomalies immediately in order to prevent loss of yield.

“Even if you’re a small commercial farm with a few hundred acres, it's impossible to see everything that's going on without an overhead view. You're literally spraying money in the air if you aren’t using aerial imagery for full visual control over your farm,” said Jayappa.

To help its agricultural retailers and farmers run their land more efficiently and economically, TerrAvion created more than 100 unique products, priced based on volume, region, and product.

Robert Morris, CEO of TerrAvion said, “Farmers know where they are going to be planting their fields, but they might rotate the crops and locations by season. If that farmer has four core services -- viticulture, potato, grass, and seed services -- as well as add-on training services and annual acreage growth, the rate plans get complicated. Completely custom plans for each farm made it very difficult to provide customers with a single view of what they were being billed for."

TerrAvion’s highly complex subscription-based business made quoting, pricing, invoicing, order tracking, and billing very challenging and limited the company’s growth.

“No company should try building their own billing system. Our end goal was to find a unified platform that could automatically invoice and streamline everything, from how a customer ordered the service to how we recognized the revenue. That’s why we selected Zuora and went live as fast as possible,” said Jayappa.

Since the 39 day go-live, TerrAvion has operationalized its complex subscription-based pricing, simplified the sales and billing processes, and established a platform for continued growth of its agriculture aerial imagery service.

“TerrAvion has a substantial volume lead in the industry offering the best value and the lowest prices to our customers in the US and Brazil. By running our business on the Zuora platform, we can further expand worldwide -- this year into Canada. We couldn't be operating at this scale without Zuora,” said Morris.

TerrAvion’s use of the Zuora platform has helped the company achieve the following business goals:

Streamlined order-to-revenue process - TerrAvion previously had an invoicing platform that went through Quickbooks and a separate ordering platform that did not talk to one another. The company managed rate plans in spreadsheets and had no easy way to invoice without using an engineer on a full-time basis to regenerate invoices. The Zuora platform eliminated these problems by centralizing the entire order-to-revenue process for TerrAvion.
Pricing flexibility - TerrAvion’s more than 100 products are priced based on volume, region, and product. Zuora’s platform eliminated the need for new SKUs to add new services for every order. Now TerrAvion can manage delivery-based pricing and enter a schedule and rate plan to add a new service in fewer than 30 minutes.
Improved customer relationships - By streamlining billing to make the process more transparent to customers, TerrAvion can now focus on building positive relationships with customers rather than wasting time quoting and invoicing. On the Zuora platform, TerrAvion customers are able to self-serve online to select plans and trigger automatic invoices.

For more detail on the TerrAvion story, please visit: https://www.zuora.com/our-customers/case-studies/terravion/

About Zuora, Inc.

Zuora provides the leading cloud-based subscription management platform that functions as a system of record for subscription businesses across all industries. Powering the Subscription Economy™, the Zuora® platform was architected specifically for dynamic, recurring subscription business models and acts as an intelligent subscription management hub that automates and orchestrates the entire subscription order-to-cash process, including billing and revenue recognition. Zuora serves more than 1,000 companies around the world, including Box, Komatsu, Rogers, Schneider Electric, Xplornet and Zendesk. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Zuora also operates offices in Atlanta, Boston, Denver, San Francisco, London, Paris, Beijing, Sydney, Chennai and Tokyo. To learn more about the Zuora platform, please visit www.zuora.com.

© 2019 Zuora, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Zuora, Subscription Economy, Powering the Subscription Economy are trademarks or registered trademarks of Zuora, Inc. Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others. 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.

SOURCE: Zuora Financial