Zuora Central Functions as Essential System for SendGrid's Growth to Public Company

SAN MATEO, Calif., Feb. 28, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Zuora, Inc. the leading provider of cloud-based software used to launch, manage and transform a company's subscription business, today announced that its customer SendGrid scaled from a startup to a public software company, adopting the Zuora® Central platform in 2010 to support its business growth.

SendGrid, a leading digital communication platform, needed an infrastructure to scale with its high customer demand and growing transaction volume. To do so, the company implemented the Zuora platform eight years ago and has since grown to serve more than 63,000 customers. Now at the size and scale of a public company, the SendGrid management team relies on the speed at which Zuora delivers subscription metrics to make informed business decisions.

SendGrid's use of Zuora helped the company support its business goals of:

• Public Market Readiness: With a single-source-of-truth to track all revenue-related transactions, Zuora provides SendGrid with the ability to access revenue and customer data in real-time on the first of every month and make immediate decisions critical to business strategy and growth. 
• Operational Efficiency: With Zuora, SendGrid was able to produce revenue numbers on a one-day close cycle.
• New Customer Acquisition: Zuora solved the usage-based billing and reporting complexity of SendGrid's services portfolio for two types of buyers: developers and marketers. Running on Zuora, SendGrid can handle new discounts, change pricing tiers, and experiment with new pricing models.

SendGrid CFO/COO Yancey Spruill said, "With Zuora we have access to the data we need to answer critical questions, from how to scale our sales and marketing investment, to how to understand our profitability per customer. Zuora's platform has enabled us to make better business decisions, faster."

SendGrid enables businesses to engage with their customers via email reliably, effectively, and at scale. The timely and accurate information that the company draws from its financial reporting systems has helped the company continue to grow. "Subscription growth is just something that can't be handled by anything but a highly automated and scalable platform like Zuora," continued Spruill.

"To survive in today's world, you need to grow fast as a software company. At Zuora, we're proud to accelerate revenue at scale for SaaS companies like SendGrid as they continue to provide value to their customers," said Tom Krackeler, SVP of Product at Zuora.

Zuora Central is the foundation of SendGrid's cloud-based subscription model, offering subscription management for its usage-based pricing (generally priced on a monthly basis by email volume). The Subscription Economy Index^TM found that subscription-based businesses like SendGrid's, which employed usage-based billing in their revenue mix, grew more than twice as fast on average as those that didn't. The SEI also showed that companies that employ usage-based billing have lower churn rates than those that do not, at all levels of usage-based revenue mix.

To adapt these lessons of growth for your own company, download Zuora's guide "10 Growth Strategies for SaaS" and whitepaper on "The Three SaaS Metrics that Matter." You can also read the SendGrid case study here.

Additional Resources
"The Subscription Economy: A Business Transformation" by Tien Tzuo, CEO of Zuora
SlideShare: "Drivers of Success in the Subscription Economy"
MGI Research Forecast on Agile Monetization Platforms 2016-2020
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About Zuora, Inc.
Zuora, powering the Subscription Economy®, provides the only SaaS platform that automates all subscription order-to-cash operations in real-time for any business. Companies in any industry can launch new businesses, shift products to subscription, implement new pay-as-you-go pricing and packaging models, gain new insights into subscriber behavior, and disrupt market segments to gain competitive advantage. Zuora serves more than 900 companies around the world in a wide range of industries, including Box, Komatsu, Rogers, Schneider Electric, Toshiba, Xplornet and Zendesk. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Zuora also operates offices in Atlanta, Boston, Denver, San Francisco, London, Paris, Beijing, Sydney, Chennai and Tokyo.

About SendGrid
SendGrid SEND, is a leading digital communication platform, enabling businesses to engage with their customers via email reliably, effectively and at scale. A leader in email deliverability, SendGrid has processed over 40 billion emails each month for internet and mobile-based customers as well as more traditional enterprises.

Media Contact:
Jayne Scuncio
jscuncio@zuora.com
408-348-1087

© 2018 Zuora, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Zuora and Subscription Economy are trademarks of Zuora, Inc. Third party trademarks mentioned above are owned by their respective companies. Nothing in this press release should be construed to the contrary, or as an approval, endorsement or sponsorship by any third parties of Zuora, Inc. or any aspect of this press release. To learn more about the Zuora platform, please visit www.zuora.com.