Zuora Offers Free Platform Workflows to Enable Customer Growth During Unpredictable Market Conditions

Zuora, Inc. (NYSE: ZUO), the leading subscription management platform provider, today announced the next generation of its Zuora® Central Platform and free pre-built workflows to provide customers with the agility to adapt to rapidly changing market conditions. Powered by Zuora's cloud-based microservices architecture, the enterprise platform helps companies test and launch new subscription products faster at scale ⁠— beyond tens of millions of active subscriptions.

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The Zuora Central Platform arms subscription businesses with the agility to adapt to market demands at scale. (Graphic: Business Wire)

A company's true competitive advantage comes from its on-going relationships with customers. While product-centric S&P 500 companies saw sales decline in Q1 2020, customer-centric subscription businesses have proven to be resilient and agile amid unpredictable market conditions. Roughly half of these companies saw limited impact to their subscription growth rates, while 20% actually saw an acceleration.

According to the Subscribed Institute, subscription businesses who are agile enough to respond to changing customer needs grow at three times the rate of their peers. With a flexible platform, companies can offer customers more options and greater control over their subscriptions. For example, by offering customers options to suspend subscriptions, the Institute found that subscription businesses can save 1 out of every 6 customers from churning.

However, IT teams, hamstrung by monolithic systems, can’t swiftly adapt, seize growth opportunities, or scale amid external pressures. “COVID-19 is a great example of an unpredictable and massive impact on businesses which requires an agile platform to enable the company to react at scale to offer concessions such as suspends, payment delays, and offer credits so businesses can accommodate their customers quickly and reduce churn,” said Mark Thomason, Research Director at IDC. “Businesses need easy ways of testing growth ideas like new products and bundles so they can be prepared as the market heals. Having a solid technology foundation and infrastructure that efficiently enables this agility is critical today and is paramount to sustaining, growing, and competing in any economic climate,” continues Thomason.

The Zuora Central Platform arms subscription businesses with the agility to adapt to market demands at scale. Zuora's platform couples enterprise-grade capabilities with latest consumer-scale cloud technologies such as AWS, DynamoDB, and Presto, to extend Zuora's suite of Order-to-Revenue applications for the enterprise.

Now generally available, developers will be able to leverage new features and enhanced capabilities of the Zuora Central Platform including:

• Custom Objects enables companies to customize and extend the Zuora data model to power industry-specific use cases with immense processing power across billions of objects.
• Data Query provides fast access to live distributed data all through a standard SQL interface.
• Workflow orchestrates business processes across all platform data and services. For six months, customers will receive free access to Zuora Workflow software for five specific use cases to address common challenges in response to COVID-19. They include applying goodwill discounts, applying credit back, suspending subscriptions, resuming subscriptions, and suspending payment collections.
• Audit Trail gives CFOs a trusted, financially compliant system to minimize risk exposure with reporting and monitoring of critical subscription activity.
• Zuora Central Sandbox leverages microservices architecture to enable developers to nimbly test and deploy new capabilities without multiple day delays.

Since June 2019, the number of customers leveraging Zuora’s platform and adopting these new features has grown to more than half of its user base. Many companies have seen faster time to market with the launch of new subscription products and services.

Hudl, a sports analysis software company with over 3.5 million users was an early adopter. “Zuora’s test environment capabilities allowed us to simulate a change to our product catalog on 150,000 subscriptions ahead of doing the change in production. The confidence it gave us led to the completion of the project several months earlier than anticipated with minimal impact on our users. Definitely an effective tool for the job,” said Paul Poulsen, Engineering Manager at Hudl.

To learn how the Zuora Central Platform features can help companies move fast and respond to unpredictable market changes, visit the product page 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-revenue process seamlessly across billing and revenue recognition. Zuora serves more than 1,000 companies around the world, including Box, Rogers, Schneider Electric, Xplornet and Zendesk. Headquartered in 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.

© 2020 Zuora, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Zuora, Subscribed, Subscription Economy, Powering the Subscription Economy, and Subscription Economy Index are trademarks or registered trademarks of Zuora, Inc. Third-party trademarks mentioned above are owned by their respective companies. 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

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including but not limited to statements regarding the expected growth and trends in the market for subscription businesses, and the expected benefits of any such trends. Any statements that are not statements of historical fact may be deemed to be forward-looking statements, and actual results could differ materially from those stated or implied in forward-looking statements. This press release also includes market data and certain other statistical information and estimates from industry analysts and/or market research firms. Zuora believes these third party reports to be reputable, but has not independently verified the underlying data sources, methodologies or assumptions. Information that is based on estimates, forecasts, projections, market research or similar methodologies is inherently subject to uncertainties and actual events or circumstances may differ materially from events and circumstances reflected in this information.

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