Zuora, the company that made its bones in subscription billing and payments, held its annual Subscribed user meeting in San Francisco last week and staked out some new turf.
It always has been focused on the back office, but its latest messaging included elements of the front office. Perhaps it's no surprise given CEO Tien Tzuo's history as an early luminary at Salesforce, rising to the CMO position before he left.
The new turf straddles the two worlds we're most accustomed to dealing with -- the front and back offices. This area, let's call it the middle office, takes data from either side, changes it and passes it on to processes that go in both directions.
Among the applications that act this way are compensation management, subscription billing, customer success management and possibly HR. Each application area does different things for different reasons.
Compensation Management
Xactly may be the best example of a pure-play comp system, though certainlyCallidusCloud should be included.
Sales incentive compensation used to be a pure back-office thing because it tallied up sales and applied some algorithms then cut checks. Today, however, comp management is also about motivating people within an active quarter by identifying best opportunities and ensuring appropriate resources are applied.
For that, the marketing and sales automation data is useful, and derived information is fed back into SFA. That's a long way from pure compensation.