“If you’re running a development team and you’re using Zuora, you should be looking at Workflow.” — Jason Gulledge, VP of Engineering at StackPath

Company:
StackPath
Industry:
Software and technology
The Customer

StackPath is a rapidly growing provider of inherently secure cloud services and a global platform for secure edge computing.

The Challenge

They needed one consistent platform to manage billing across their different acquisitions, and they needed to ensure their business processes could easily scale.

The Solution

The Zuora Central Platform offers StackPath seamless and fully automated billing and accounting processes no matter how many new customers are added.

The Benefits

StackPath now has clean data, fully automated subscription management processes and excellent reporting, which helps the team focus on strategic ways to grow the business.

Thanks to Workflow Builder and other capabilities in the Zuora Central Platform, reporting is a lot easier and we have consistent data for our new platform, which has simplified our accrual process. — Jason Gulledge, VP of Engineering at StackPath

StackPath was founded in 2015 by Lance Crosby with a mission to make the internet safe. StackPath’s platform leverages collaborative intelligence to make each of its services smarter, more secure, and easier to use with every threat detected. Multiple early acquisitions provided the initial foundation of the security-as-a-service platform and an immediately large customer base.

StackPath brought in Zuora Billing early on to help merge all their customers and to migrate the many homegrown systems of the newly acquired companies onto one standardized platform.

“I wanted to focus my time on the technology that we wanted to build, and not on building a billing system,” said Jason Gulledge, VP of Engineering at StackPath.

StackPath was also intent on having a digital channel for its subscribers that was a frictionless, on-demand, self-service experience.

“Zuora met the complexity of our business from a customer subscription basis. The flexibility of the Zuora platform enables StackPath to manage different bill cycles for customers, easily handle overage pricing, manage payment information, and more. And, with customer account setup, product setup, and rate plans all structured to work together, migration and implementation has been surprisingly painless — internally and externally,” said Kim Ledesma, VP of Billing and Business Information Systems.

With Zuora’s help, StackPath has been able to focus on propelling the business forward. Last year, it introduced a new and improved platform offering secure cloud services built at the “edge of the internet” — that is, closer to where data is processed instead of at a centralized data center. With the world’s first and only secure edge platform, StackPath has enjoyed an explosion of new customers, adding 35,000 new accounts in less than a year.

The new growth presented a challenge, however. “We went from 300 signups per month to close to 5,000. It just wasn’t tenable for the billing team to continue to manually manage subscriptions,” said Gulledge.

StackPath needed a quick way to fully automate business processes — and they found it in the Workflow Builder in the Zuora Central Platform which helps businesses orchestrate financial operations and trigger external processes such as provisioning, data integrations, and customer communications. Leveraging Workflow, Gulledge created automations for all of the backend tasks, saving the billing team 120 hours per month to focus on other things.

“Billing went from having to do something manually every day to not at all,” says Gulledge, who now calls StackPath a “Workflow power user.”

In addition to freeing up precious hours, Workflow forces consensus building and tighter subscription management processes at StackPath, which makes for fewer errors and easier reporting and compliance.

“Reporting is also a lot easier now and we have consistent, accurate data for our new platform, which has simplified our accrual process. And because we have consistent data in Zuora, we can spin up a dashboard every hour that the executive team can use to track conversion rates, total lifetime value, and other important subscription business metrics,” continued Gulledge.

As StackPath continues to build out its holistic security platform, Zuora is proud to help it scale and grow across the world.

“I wanted to focus my time on the technology that we wanted to build, and not on building a billing system.” - Jason Gulledge, VP of Engineering at StackPath

“With Zuora, our billing team went from having to do something manually every day to not at all.” - Jason Gulledge, VP of Engineering at StackPath

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