Zuora Unveils the Zuora Central Developer Platform at Annual Subscribed San Francisco

Zuora, Inc. (NYSE: ZUO), the leading cloud-based subscription management software provider, unveiled its new Zuora Central Developer Platform today at Subscribed® San Francisco. The Central Developer Platform allows companies to integrate, extend and orchestrate all aspects of a subscription business from a single platform. Developers can use platform capabilities to build upon Zuora’s existing applications – Zuora Billing, Zuora RevPro, Zuora Collect, Zuora CPQ – for their unique subscription business. The Central Developer Platform is available for developers and partners at labs.zuora.com.

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The Zuora Central Developer Platform allows companies to integrate, extend and orchestrate all aspects of a subscription business from a single platform. (Graphic: Business Wire)

“With the rise of the Subscription Economy over the past 10 years, more than a thousand companies now use Zuora’s suite of applications to monetize their subscription services. But ongoing subscription services also require companies to integrate and orchestrate operations across multiple systems. Over the past three years, we built the Zuora Central Developer Platform to do just that. Now, companies have a single platform to monetize and orchestrate their subscription services,” said Tom Krackeler, SVP of Product at Zuora.

By 2023, Gartner predicts that 75 percent of organizations selling direct to consumer will offer subscription services¹, and in its Digital Commerce State of the Union survey, Gartner found that 70 percent of all organizations have deployed or are considering the deployment of subscription services².

As the entertainment market shifts from song downloads to streaming music; as the car industry shifts from car sales to connected services; and as traditional manufacturers go from selling products to delivering internet enabled devices; all industries are faced with operational challenges as the monetization of “things” shifts to the monetization of subscription services.

A Subscription Economy Index™ (SEI) Benchmark report indicates that every subscription change creates a downstream impact of at least 15 other operational events. For example, streaming media companies need to connect financial operations with identity management systems and content access rights; and auto manufacturers must integrate subscription management into their existing VIN management systems for matching available cars to connected services, dealerships, and location of fleets; and traditional manufacturers need to actively monitor device usage with device activation, device usage tracking, and device analytics.

“Without a consistent platform and architecture to unify and orchestrate subscription revenue operations in billing, order management, collections, revenue recognition, and financial reporting among others, and connect these capabilities to the larger finance ecosystem, companies will struggle to grow their subscription businesses,” said Andrew Dailey, Managing Director at MGI Research.

To foster emerging subscription services across all industries, Zuora is opening up its platform to enable developers and partners to build on Zuora Central. With the Central Developer Platform, companies can now bridge unique industry systems with the financial operations that Zuora's industry-leading applications enable today. Developers and IT teams have complete control to power end-to-end subscriber experiences and remove inefficiencies across multiple teams.

With the Zuora Central Developer Platform, developers and IT professionals will be able to leverage:

• Workflow Builder: Create workflows to orchestrate financial operations and trigger external processes such as provisioning, data integrations, and customer communications.
• Custom Objects: Customize the Zuora object model to run a larger footprint of subscription operations and capture a broader set of data through Zuora to power industry-specific use cases.
• Events and Notifications: Listen for subscription events and then execute callouts, notifications, and workflows.
• Data Queries: Create tailored queries to capture and connect data without limitations. Query data with SQL operators and export to any data warehouse with new query APIs.

“Workflow is a great tool to help complete the customizations we need to have at New Relic,” said Bernard Mesa, Lead Financial App Developer of New Relic. “We use it to customize communications, transform data, and to help take the tedium out of many business processes. I keep discovering new processes we can automate within the Zuora Central Developer Platform and it continues to improve our efficiency.”

“Workflow capability of the Zuora Central Platform has made life so much easier for us,” said Jason Gulledge, Co-founder and VP of Development of StackPath. “Workflow is intelligent and powerful, enabling my team to become even more efficient, while improving customer experience for our end customers. I consider it an absolute must have for anyone who uses Zuora.”

The Zuora Central Developer Platform is available at labs.zuora.com. Additional platform innovations will be added as they become readily available.

Watch the Subscribed® San Francisco keynote here and read about the Summer ‘19 release here.

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 the Silicon Valley, Zuora also operates offices around the world in the U.S., EMEA and APAC. 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

¹ Predicts 2019: New Deployment Models, Channels and Technologies Spark Digital Commerce Growth, Gartner Inc., December 10, 2018, Mark Lewis & Christina Klock

² Survey Analysis: Use of Multiple Technologies for Digital Commerce Innovation, Gartner Inc., November 9, 2018, Penny Gillespie

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