by Shawn Price, President
The transition to Cloud Computing is fueling a massive build out of Cloud infrastructure, projected to exceed $11 billion by 2013. With the so many new Cloud services forming from consumer, to mobile, to gaming, the question becomes: How do you then monetize these Clouds? As Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo has said many times, unless the Cloud can solve the metering, pricing and billing problem, providers won’t be able to monetize their offerings and the Cloud will never meet its potential.
Today, Zuora is excited to announce that it is the billing platform for Citrix’s CloudStack Open Source project. We’ve been one of the first ecosystem partners for the venture and have enjoyed watching it flourish. Per today’s announcement, Citrix CloudStack will become the first Cloud
platform project to join the open source Apache Software Foundation. Citrix is the infrastructure to this new Cloud enterprise, and is aiming to take this huge ecosystem of 30k members and help them build true Amazon-style Clouds.
Citrix’s dedication to openness and has resonated not only with us, but with over 30 leading technologists and ecosystem partners including Zuora customers Tata Communications, and Australian Cloud provider Ninefold. These companies recognize the potential of the Cloud, the portability of the CloudStack program, and the importance of billing.
Two years ago, Zuora set out to be the Cloud billing leader with the launch of Z-Commerce for the Cloud — a solution for anyone who wants to build a public, private, hybrid Cloud. When we launched Z-Commerce for the Cloud, it was our goal that no Cloud provider would have to build their own billing system. Since that time, Zuora has become the commerce engine for HP, GoGrid, Dell, Tata Communications, IC&S, Zetta, and Ninefold.
With today’s announcement, Zuora offers unparalled openness for Cloud providers to use their Cloud of choice. Whether, you’re building a Cloud using Microsoft Azure, VMware vCloud, OpenStack and now Citrix’s CloudStack, Zuora’s Z-Commerce for the Cloud is the leading billing platform for service providers to capitalize on the unique opportunities of the Cloud.
We’ve lead the market. We’ve built an amazing product. And we’re very proud and excited to be part of CloudStack and the Software Foundation.