Billing, Schmilling and the value of integration

Yesterday I drove up to San Francisco in the middle of a record-setting heatwave to attend a dockside party thrown by Zuora, a billing-automation SaaS startup.  They were celebrating signing their 100th customer, as well as signing Sun, who hopes to compete with ENKI in the Cloud Computing arena sometime soon, using their recent aquisition of QLayer.  I was there to look at their software, but also to talk to the people. 

Schmoozing about in the heat, I met a few bright-eyed startup entrepreneurs as well as a preponderance of Zuora partners.  I got a demo of Zuora, which is a very snazzy billing package that allows for all manner of subscription and on-demand billing to be automated.   ENKI needs something like this, since our NetSuite ERP system doesn't have the faintest idea of the billing challenges we face.  In addition, we are considering offering billing services to our customers who themselves run SaaS applications.   We've held off on Zuora ourselves in part due to the price, but also because we wanted to be sure we understood the problem before looking for a solution.  I understand it now... all too well!

What impressed me - and explained the number of partner companies at the event - is that Zuora has really tried to focus on one thing alone: billing.  To do this, they have to own their customers' item list, which means that traditional  business applications like ecommerce and accounting have to be integrated with Zuora.  After implementing a SalesForce.com integration, they switched to relying on Boomi for their integrations to get more traction.  As a result, they have come a long way in a short time, by focusing brutally on what their value is raather than integrating with everyone else.

This, I think, is the lesson for business in these times: focus, focus, focus.   For us at ENKI, it means that we'd be best off leaving billing to someone else even though I shudder at the price.  For you, our customer, it means that if you can avoid coding by integrating with other services, you should do so.  That way your product will make it to market faster, and your time to value will decrease, which will bring you investment or revenue as you have planned for.