Bringing Pricing, Quoting

Zuora Brings the Middle Office toSalesforce With the explosion of cloud computing, many companies arechanging their business models to online subscription-based services,much like the way Salesforce.com revolutionized the softwareindustry. Salesforce.com is the front office standard for thosecompanies with solutions that help recruit new customers and manageexisting ones. Unfortunately, back-office systems such as ordermanagement, ERP and accounting applications were designed forone-time transaction commerce, and not recurring subscriptionbusiness models. As a result, subscription-based models face numerousshortcomings in key parts of the Lead to Cash process, resulting in:

"Salesforce.com has paved the way with Cloud-based front officeapplications, but customers with subscription-based businesses findthey need support for 'middle office' processes," said DenisPombriant, principal analyst of Beagle Research. "What's lacking isthe pricing, quoting, orders and renewals for the subscriptioneconomy to thrive."

10. The provider of on-demand software said the cloud-computing market opportunity is "enormous" and projected Q4 revenue above analysts' views, sending shares up. Salesforce's Q3 EPS doubled, as revenue rose 30%. Net-App, a data storage equipment provider, forecast Q3 EPS below ...