by Tricia Reilly

Tuesday night, Zuora hosted a cocktail party at La Mar, celebrating the launch of our Z-Billing 2.0 subscription billing service and the fact that we’ve signed over 100 SaaS billing customers in less than a year.

For those of you who may not know, San Francisco experienced a bit of a heat wave last week, so the unseasonably warm weather made for an ideal dockside get together for the who’s who of the SaaS world.

At one point I was speaking with a group of Zuora customers and I realized that we were all already using or switching to subscription services in virtually every aspect of our businesses; from marketing automation to webmail to business intelligence.

It suddenly dawned on me that not only is Zuora enabling SaaS and subscription companies to grow revenue and increase operational efficiency, but we’ve created a community of subscription savvy companies who are relying more and more on cloud computing services to enable focus and growth.

In addition to sipping Pisco Sours, I proceeded to spend a good part of the evening introducing customers to partners, prospects to customers, and so on. It reminded me of the early days of the Internet when I worked for one of the largest web hosting companies. Not only were customers side by side in the data center with the hottest Internet properties, but they derived real business value from industry events which were a hotbed of business development activity.

With the launch (and the heat wave) firmly behind us, I’m looking forward to seeing the next wave of charge models for existing and new subscription products to drive growth for our customers and partners. Can you think of a way you’d like to price that we haven’t thought of yet? Did you find a new prospect at the launch event? Drop us a note and let us know!