SOFTWARE SUBSCRIPTION
“ A light bulb went off and we realised that this is going to be a massive revolution : we call it the ‘ end of ownership ”
— Tien Tzuo , Co-founder and CEO of Zuora
72 our consumers : ‘ we ’ re not only going to take away all the hassles of managing your own products , services and systems , we ’ re also going to change the business model ’. That service subscription mindset was just as important for our success . We fundamentally disrupted the software sector and a few decades later other software companies have gone in that direction . Now everyone wants to subscribe to software .”
Fast-forward to around 2007 and Tzuo was convinced that software-as-a-service was the future . After a hard day ’ s work , he and some colleagues were at a bar and questioned if a subscription model could apply to industries other than software ? Could the automotive or aviation industry benefit from the subscription model , for example ? What about energy or the construction sector ? They had heard of up-and-coming firms like Zipcar , Go Get and Netflix who were entering the fray with subscription solutions and suddenly it clicked — this could be the next industry shift .
“ These companies were in completely different industries , but they were
APRIL 2019