In a world where businesses must adapt swiftly to ever-evolving market demands and shifting customer expectations, it’s the Admins and Developers who play a pivotal role. They are the unsung heroes responsible for extending, deploying, and integrating the Zuora Platform as businesses pivot and evolve. The challenge they face, however, lies in orchestrating billing and revenue within the broader enterprise architecture – a task easier said than done.

For CIOs, this challenge is further amplified, as they are tasked with making critical investments in modern billing and revenue systems to monetize recurring revenue streams and drive subscriber-led growth. Traditional billing and revenue systems are ill-suited to these new business models, as they are designed for one-time transactions. 

Most SaaS applications can easily connect with other software through APIs. However, when dealing with systems that support subscription-based businesses, the complexity increases significantly. These systems need to be intricately linked to various parts of your enterprise architecture, including CRM, ERP, payment gateways, tax software, and more.

Imagine a situation where your business expands into a new region, like New Zealand or Australia. This expansion requires integrating country-specific direct debit systems. Or, when you bring on a new enterprise sales team, it might necessitate changes in how orders are processed through a Configure Price Quote (CPQ) tool. Additionally, transitioning to a new ERP, tax vendor, or any other system related to billing and revenue can require several months of integration updates.

As you can see, these complexities can quickly pile up. In fact, our own Global Services team estimates that 30% of typical Zuora Billing system implementation time is spent on integrations alone. If a business can’t handle these integrations efficiently, they become bottlenecks. That’s a lot to think about when having to manage a significant number of different integrations. 

With all that said, this is why we’re excited to unveil the Zuora Integration Hub for the first time. Instead of rewriting code for every single connection point, the Integration Hub has a Click-to-Connect User Interface that allows Zuora Admins to configure and deploy from the largest selection of prebuilt connectors. 

Zuora now has more than 80 pre-built connectors, the most recent of which include Snowflake, HubSpot, Salesforce CPQ, and app stores, like Apple and Google. We have a dozen more on the near term roadmap for even more data warehouses, CPQs, ERPs, and app stores. 

This easy integration ability lets CIOs and CTOs add the power of Zuora into their technology stack in much faster time. 

Take a look at the demo video to see how this works in more detail:

Enhancing Business Agility with Zuora’s Extension Studio

CIOs who’ve made investments in CRMs or ERPs recognize the significance of seamlessly integrating contemporary billing and revenue systems into their current enterprise infrastructure. Yet, custom integrations pose an even greater challenge. 

Managing these integrations between existing enterprise applications and billing and revenue systems leads to time-consuming and costly implementations. As market demands shift, companies must continuously adopt new integrations or update their existing ones, further complicating the process and impeding business agility.

While we take great pride in our pre-built integrations, they only address part of the equation. If a business needs a custom integration, like a home grown entitlement system, we recognize that they can’t use pre-built connectors for those. 

Every business is going to have different requirements, and it’s not enough to just be able to integrate quickly with other systems. Modern businesses also need to move fast and adapt to custom changes as and when they see fit. 

This is why we’re introducing the Zuora Extension Studio, a collection of productized components allowing customers to configure new functionality within core applications or create new solutions from scratch. We want modern businesses to be able to adapt as fast as they need to. 

Since every company has a slightly different way of handling their business, we’re convinced that Zuora customers need a cohesive set of tools to help them safely configure ‘last mile’ use cases, adapt to business process changes, and even grow into new regions.

So whether you want to:

• Add a new approval step before sending high-dollar invoices
• Change the Zuora UI, and add actions for your customer support team
• Completely change your process in Zuora overnight

You have the power to make it happen right within Zuora’s Extension Studio. These versatile components are at your disposal, enabling you to swiftly mold Zuora to suit your evolving requirements.

The Zuora Extension Studio includes components that allow you to configure custom business logic, objects, events, business process flows, and UI pages. And for the first time, our customers will be able to seamlessly integrate their own business processes into the workflows we’ve already taken great care to build out.

To dive into what’s truly game changing about these extension studio components, take a look at the demo video to see how it works:

Extension Studio will be available starting in early 2024. To learn more about the Zuora Platform, please visit here.

Key takeaways

As part of Zuora’s efforts to enhance modern business, our new Zuora Integration Hub and Extension Studio can help your business: 

• Streamline integrations: The Zuora Integration Hub offers a Click-to-Connect User Interface with over 80 pre-built connectors, simplifying the integration process and reducing the time spent on integrations.

• Expand your technology stack: Easily integrate Zuora with various data warehouses, Configure Price Quote (CPQ) tools, ERPs, and app stores to enhance your technology stack and drive business growth.

• Accelerate adaptation: With Zuora’s Extension Studio, you can create custom solutions and adapt to evolving business needs quicker, ensuring that your billing and revenue systems keep up with market demands.

• Customize workflows: Tailor Zuora to your unique business requirements by configuring custom business logic, objects, events, business process flows, and UI pages, allowing you to mold Zuora to fit your specific needs.

To explore the potential growth your business could see with flexible integrations, talk to one of our experts today.