Subscribed ’14 Insights

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We’re busy compiling and summarizing a vast amount of invaluable insight from last week’s Subscribed conference, but in the meantime here are some highlight quotes. Enjoy.

“The winners of the new industries, the winners of the new world, will be the ones that reinvent their industry with a new subscription experience. An experience that is personalized, an experience that is real-time, an experience that is immediate, an experience that is ongoing, an experience that delivers unique customer moments.”

Tien Tzuo, CEO, Zuora

 “Since we announced [our subscription model], our market cap has more than doubled. A lot of this has to do with lifetime value; you have to believe in the retention rates of what you get, you have to believe in the quality of the revenue stream.”

David Wadhwani, SVP, Adobe

 “Five or seven years ago, my guess is that Wall Street wouldn’t have understood this notion of a subscription at all and didn’t have the tools to measure what a good subscription business was versus a bad subscription business. …Venture capitalists went through this three to four years ago . . . the broad investment community is coming to terms with it now.”

 Mike Volpi, Index Ventures

“As the popularity of cloud computing rises and the digital economy becomes the new normal, subscription pricing will overtake perpetual licensing and maintenance by 2019, predicts Gartner. Over half of companies have changed or are in the process of changing how they price and deliver goods and services, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit.”

CIO Magazine

“Consumer behavior, especially among younger people, is changing, and the need to own and house goods—from music to cars to physical documents—is waning. While Wall Street grapples with how to evaluate some of the subscription-only companies (à la Box), it has clearly worked up an appetite for a recurring revenue model that gives companies all sorts of new ways to engage with old and new customers. “

Fortune Magazine

 “In the software world, categories like ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) have created tremendous value, as seen with the success of companies like Salesforce.com and Workday.But there may be a new category emerging: relationship business management or RBM. Think of this as essentially using new technologies to transform business models.And the company that’s leading the charge is Zuora. In short order, it has made RBM a reality for many top companies like Acxiom, NCR, HP, American Express, TripAdvisor and Qualcomm.”

 Forbes Magazine

“Tzuo’s company Zuora, started the subscription billing market back when billing was the only deal that SaaS and other subscription companies had to think about. But over the last few years Zuora has built out a product line that supports a vision of a changed marketplace dedicated to the values of what futurist Jeremy Rifkin calls the ‘collaborative commons.’ In the commons it is more blessed to borrow, share, rent, and, yes, subscribe, than it is to buy, own, and hold.”

Beagle Research Group

“Our new business is about outputs. It’s about the client picking a subscription, us delivering on that the most efficient and responsible way we can, and then billing for that subscription in a seamless and effective way.”

Ben Shields, Partner, Deloitte Private

“Now with the cloud and with our SaaS products we are actually reaching the actual scientist, the person doing the experiment. That’s giving us greater insight into what they are doing. What kinds of products and services they need from us as well as allowing us to actually reach them which previously they were the unknown user.”

Mark Field, CTO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

“The journey we set out on was to convert and begin the process of moving our customers from the shrink-wrapped product to online, hosted versions of those key products.”

Neil Williams, CFO, Intuit

“Customers today fundamentally have a different level of expectations from their vendors and their companies. In some senses that traditional power angle has been handed from the vendor back to the customer.”

 Andrew Landrum, Direcort of Finance, Acxiom

 

 

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