Zuora’s metered billing and subscription management solution automates HD Cloud’s customer acquisition processes
Redwood City, CA — April 2, 2010 — Zuora, the leader and fastest growing billing and commerce platform, today announced that HD Cloud is using Zuora’s solution to support a new freemium model for its cloud-based video encoding service. The HD Cloud freemium model leverages the company’s technology for scaling real-time video transcoding sessions, and offers the most attractive path for customers to migrate their encoding needs into the cloud. Zuora enables HD Cloud’s freemium model by giving HD Cloud a platform for creating flexible pricing models, and an end-to-end system that automates the customer onboarding, upgrading, invoicing, collections and renewal processes.
HD Cloud founders Nicholas Butterworth and Tatum Lade held positions with MTV and iFilm when they realized the video solutions in their industry were lacking. They founded HD Cloud to provide a powerful video technology solution at an affordable price. Using cloud computing and parallel processing, HD Cloud helps customers meet the growing demand for broadband, mobile, IPTV and VOD content delivery. As a cloud company similar to Amazon Web Services, HD Cloud implemented a metered pricing model where its customers paid based on how much bandwidth and storage was consumed. Since its inception, HD Cloud had been manually managing their enterprise customers’ subscription lifecycle. However, the company’s torrid growth was far outstripping its ability to manual process orders, calculate invoices, and collect payments.
After evaluating options in the market, HD Cloud recognized Zuora as the best fit for its needs — And the only vendor truly able to support its freemium delivery model. Just two months after deployment, the Zuora billing and commerce platform, has already helped HD Cloud improve the way it manages customer data and invoicing, as well as to ensure the company meets Payment Card Industry (PCI) requirements.
“Unlike competitive offerings, the Zuora billing and commerce platform could clearly handle the complexities of subscription metering and upsells, a critical part of our freemium strategy,” said HD Cloud CEO Nicholas Butterworth. “We’ve leveraged Zuora to get customers on board faster, to automate our previously manual, time-consuming customer billing process and to achieve PCI compliance. The net result is that we’re increasing revenues while keeping operational costs in check.”
“All cloud companies that charge based on usage have a need for metered billing and no other company can deliver the capabilities and benefits that Zuora offers,” said Tien Tzuo, CEO and co-founder at Zuora. “Our ability to quickly implement a metered billing solution for HD Cloud that enabled a new freemium business model is one of the many reasons Zuora is quickly becoming the billing standard in cloud computing.”
About Zuora, Inc.
Zuora’s subscription billing and commerce platform changes the way subscription businesses manage and sell to customers, allowing them to bring new products to market in less time, with more flexibility and less hassle. Zuora customers are up and running within 90 days and often recognize 200% ROI within weeks. Zuora is built from the ground up by SaaS industry visionaries and veterans from salesforce.com, WebEx, Accenture, Google, eBay, Oracle and Vitria. Zuora customers include Reed Business Information, Coremetrics, InsideView, Marketo, Ricoh, Box.net, Xactly, HD Cloud, Cloud Central and Sun Microsystems. To learn more about Zuora, please visit zuorainternprd.wpengine.com.