the forrester wave™: saas billing solutions, q4 2019 · saas. many saas billing solutions offer a...

The Forrester Wave™: SaaS Billing Solutions, Q4 2019The Nine Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up

by Lily VaronNovember 18, 2019

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Key TakeawaysZuora And Aria Systems Lead The PackForrester’s research uncovered a market in which Zuora and Aria Systems are Leaders; Gotransverse, BillingPlatform, and SAP are Strong Performers; Salesforce and Recurly are Contenders; and RecVue and Chargify are Challengers.

Configurability, Speed, And Interoperability Are Key DifferentiatorsNo matter your business model, you have numerous vendors from which to choose. Match your prospective product choice with your needs around configurability, speed-to-market, and interoperability with your existing technology investments.

Why Read This ReportIn our 29-criterion evaluation of software-as-a-service (SaaS) billing providers, we identified the nine most significant ones — Aria Systems, BillingPlatform, Chargify, Gotransverse, Recurly, RecVue, Salesforce, SAP, and Zuora — and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report shows how each provider measures up and helps digital business strategy professionals select the right one for their needs.

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Table Of Contents

SaaS Billing Technology: A Sleeper Agent For Business Agility

Evaluation Summary

Vendor Offerings

Vendor Profiles

Leaders

Strong Performers

Contenders

Challengers

Evaluation Overview

Vendor Inclusion Criteria

Supplemental Material

Related Research Documents

The Definitive Technology Guide To Recurring Revenue Models

The Forrester Wave™: Recurring Customer And Billing Management, Q3 2017

Now Tech: Recurring Customer And Billing Management, Q2 2018

FOR EBUSINESS & CHANNEL STRATEGY PROFESSIONALS

The Forrester Wave™: SaaS Billing Solutions, Q4 2019The Nine Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up

by Lily Varonwith Fiona Swerdlow and Sara Sjoblom

November 18, 2019

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The Forrester Wave™: SaaS Billing Solutions, Q4 2019November 18, 2019

© 2019 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. [email protected] or +1 866-367-7378

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The Nine Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up

“When [billing] goes well, no one cares. When it goes wrong, it’s the end of the world.” (IT professional, communications industry)

SaaS Billing Technology: A Sleeper Agent For Business Agility

“When [billing] goes well, no one cares. When it goes wrong, it’s the end of the world,” one business customer summed up. As a digital business strategist, you may not think billing technology is in your purview. But the more digital products or services you offer — and the more partners you have that become part of your value delivery ecosystem to customers — the more likely it is that your firm’s billing scenarios will be complicated.

Your ability to keep up with market changes and the quality of your customer experiences will depend on agile billing technology. Everything from customer trust to the company’s accounting is on the line. If you are one of the one in five global purchase influencers who say changing the business model is a high priority for their companies, agile billing technology is key.1 Or if your firm, like many others, is prioritizing new product launches and business acquisitions in order to grow revenue (all key triggers for new billing technology), it is more likely that you will be influencing or driving a billing technology selection. To select the right partner for your business needs and objectives, look for providers that:

› Match your business models — today and in the near future. No matter your business model, you have numerous vendors to choose from.2 B2C companies with credit-card-based subscription autorenewals and B2B companies with usage- or consumption-based business models will have wildly different short lists for solution providers. From there, the details of what you sell, how you monetize, who your customers are, how frequently you bill, the payment/invoicing methods you use, the frequency and variability in your billing, and even the vendors’ willingness to match your pace (like doing proof of concepts, etc.) will determine which vendor will be the right match.

› Deliver the right level of configurability and automation. Gone are the days of cookie-cutter SaaS. Many SaaS billing solutions offer a high degree of configurability in order to match their customers’ diverse go-to-market and retention strategies. But now, more of these vendors are extending their core functionality with workflow tools and orchestration engines. Essentially, SaaS billing solutions are becoming lightweight versions of their on-premises operations support system and business support system (OSS-BSS) predecessors. Sometimes, this can be overkill, though, and when simplicity and speed are paramount, there are solutions for that, too.

› Integrate well with existing technology investments. Whether you’re in the business of building the “best of breed” or chasing “the suite,” your billing solution’s interoperability with your existing technology investments will certainly drive your selection. At most enterprise organizations, the billing systems must integrate closely with existing back- and front-office applications while also relying on — or delivering — data and cues to and from other systems to enhance functionality.3




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Evaluation Summary

The Forrester Wave™ evaluation highlights Leaders, Strong Performers, Contenders, and Challengers. It’s an assessment of the top vendors in the market and does not represent the entire vendor landscape. You’ll find more information about this market in our reports on recurring customer and billing management solutions and the evolving technology landscape for recurring revenue businesses.4

We intend this evaluation to be a starting point only and encourage clients to view product evaluations and adapt criteria weightings using the Excel-based vendor comparison tool (see Figure 1 and see Figure 2). Click the link at the beginning of this report on Forrester.com to download the tool.

https://www.forrester.com/report/Now+Tech+Recurring+Customer+And+Billing+Management+Q4+2019/-/E-RES155917

https://www.forrester.com/report/Now+Tech+Recurring+Customer+And+Billing+Management+Q4+2019/-/E-RES155917




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FIGURE 1 Forrester Wave™: SaaS Billing Solutions, Q4 2019

Challengers Contenders LeadersStrong

Performers

Strongercurrentoffering

Weakercurrentoffering

Weaker strategy Stronger strategy

Market presence

Aria Systems

Gotransverse

Zuora

BillingPlatform

Recurly

SAPSalesforceChargify

RecVue

SaaS Billing SolutionsQ4 2019




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FIGURE 2 Forrester Wave™: SaaS Billing Solutions Scorecard, Q4 2019

Aria S

yste

ms

Billing

Platfo

rm

Charg

ify

Gotra

nsve

rse

Recur

ly

RecVu

e

Salesfo

rce

SAP

3.44

3.40

5.00

1.00

3.60

3.70

5.00

3.00

3.00

3.00

5.00

3.75

3.00

5.00

4.00

3.00

3.24

4.00

2.80

2.00

4.00

3.00

3.00

5.00

1.00

3.00

3.00

2.25

1.00

3.00

2.00

3.00

1.85

2.90

0.90

0.00

3.55

3.80

5.00

3.00

3.00

5.00

3.00

3.50

3.00

3.00

5.00

3.00

1.80

1.20

1.00

3.00

2.70

1.00

1.00

1.00

1.00

1.00

1.00

1.75

2.00

1.00

1.00

3.00

3.43

4.30

3.20

3.00

2.90

3.20

3.00

5.00

3.00

1.00

3.00

1.75

2.00

2.00

2.00

1.00

2.09

1.50

1.00

4.00

2.70

2.40

5.00

1.00

1.00

1.00

5.00

2.25

3.00

1.00

2.00

3.00

1.70

2.90

1.90

0.00

1.30

1.50

3.00

1.00

1.00

1.00

1.00

2.25

1.00

3.00

4.00

1.00

1.89

2.05

1.90

0.50

3.00

4.00

5.00

3.00

3.00

5.00

5.00

2.25

2.00

2.00

2.00

3.00

3.80

2.80

5.00

4.00

3.30

3.70

5.00

3.00

3.00

3.00

5.00

4.25

5.00

2.00

5.00

5.00

weight

ing

Forre

ster’s

50%

30%

30%

20%

20%

50%

25%

25%

25%

15%

10%

0%

25%

25%

25%

25%

Zuora

Current offering

Billing management

Automation and amendments management

Data and insights

Platform

Strategy

Product vision

Partner ecosystem

Adjoining product strategy

Supporting services

Innovation roadmap

Market presence

Product revenue

Number of customers

Revenues under management

Global presence

All scores are based on a scale of 0 (weak) to 5 (strong).

Vendor Offerings

Forrester included nine vendors in this assessment: Aria Systems, BillingPlatform, Chargify, Gotransverse, Recurly, RecVue, Salesforce, SAP, and Zuora (see Figure 3).




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FIGURE 3 Evaluated Vendors And Product Information

Vendor

Aria Systems

BillingPlatform

Chargify

Gotransverse

Recurly

RecVue

Salesforce

SAP

Zuora

Product versionevaluated

22

8.7

N/A

N/A

N/A

19.3

N/A

1905

N/A

Solution evaluated

Aria Cloud Billing and Monetization Platform

BillingPlatform

Chargify

Gotransverse

Recurly Subscription Management

RecVue Monetization Platform

Salesforce Billing

SAP Subscription Billing

Zuora Billing

Vendor Profiles

Our analysis uncovered the following strengths and weaknesses of individual vendors.

Leaders

› Zuora stands out for its thought leadership and varied customer base. San Mateo, California-based Zuora has long dominated the mindshare in this category. The company takes this privilege seriously, investing in thought leadership via its Subscribed Institute, a podcast, and more. It targets both B2B and B2C companies of various sizes, and its products are available in several languages.5 Zuora’s product strategy is aggressive: It aims to cover most of the ground between the customer relationship management (CRM) and the enterprise resource planning (ERP) for recurring revenue businesses. To that end, it has built a core platform, Zuora Central, with four main applications: Billing, Collect, CPQ, and Revenue, and it manages a marketplace of third-party extensions. Zuora acquired a revenue recognition product in 2017, now called RevPro, which constitutes its Revenue product. Zuora went public in 2018.

This evaluation focuses specifically on Zuora’s Billing application. Zuora Billing’s strengths lie in how it leverages the new major features to the Zuora Central platform: 1) workflow builder to automate more functions and processes using conditional logic and rules, and 2) data querying with SQL, enabling users to query, join, and report on more data objects across the platform. Customer references we spoke with, especially developers, felt empowered by these new platform




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capabilities. Forrester and reference clients tell us that cultural alignment is as important as product fit to ensure success with Zuora. Zuora is a good fit for firms that are looking for a new system of record for their recurring customer relationship, where CRM and ERP play supporting roles.

› Aria Systems is hyperfocused on billing, and it partners well with its customers. San Francisco, California-based Aria Systems has focused its go-to-market strategy on tailoring its solution for key verticals versus extending its feature set into adjacent categories. The company launched a vertical-specific bundling of features, workflows, and APIs, called Media and Publishing Suite, with plans to roll out others for internet of things (IoT) and fleet management. It has also made Aria available on Microsoft Azure, in part to serve industries where Amazon is competitive (e.g., retail, cloud services). Another big focus area for Aria is evolving its data services to better support its customers’ advanced analytics initiatives.

Aria Systems’ product catalog and account hierarchy structures are exceptionally well built for configuration and reusability. Coupled with workflow tools and an eventing system (Active Orchestration) to automate consequences to changes in the system or the customer lifecycle, Aria Systems has a very capable solution.6 Its strategic focus on billing means it doesn’t have as fully featured capabilities in areas like analytics or revenue recognition as some others in this category. A big driver of customer references’ satisfaction with Aria was the transparency in their interactions (“They don’t pretend.”) and the partnership they’ve developed with their contacts at the company (“so much advice”). Aria Systems is a good fit for firms with a focused-scope search for a billing solution. This is especially true for the software and digital services, media, IoT, or automotive and fleet industries with multidimensional products and services that sell to companies with multilayered account hierarchies, and for which configurable dunning is a key requirement.

Strong Performers

› Gotransverse best fits firms with usage-based billing and rating requirements. 2019 has been the year of ecosystem building for this Austin, Texas-based company. This year, Gotransverse announced two major partnerships: one with Workday for accounting and financials, and one with Snowflake for data warehousing. It has also deepened its implementation services partnerships. A big focus for the company is globalization. It recently opened data centers in Australia and Germany to support its Asia Pacific and European expansions. Gotransverse targets customers where high-volume usage or consumption is a core part of the business model.

The company has long been tech-forward, and many of the strengths that reference customers laud are the unsexy but important platform elements like performance (“speed of bill runs and invoicing”), scalability (“processes 40 million usage events per month”), and API quality (“it plays well with other data points and systems”). The product comes with standard reporting capabilities, but customers with custom reporting needs will want to have their own reporting or business intelligence (BI) tools that leverage Gotransverse’s data lakes and APIs to ingest data. Gotransverse is a good fit for firms with usage-based billing and rating requirements, especially — but not exclusively — for those using Workday for their financial applications.




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› BillingPlatform is a best fit for firms that want to extend the platform. Denver, Colorado-based BillingPlatform is a small but fast-growing company. After securing Series A and B funding, much of the company’s focus since 2017 has been to establish its professional services and customer success organizations as well as its partner ecosystem. BillingPlatform is laser focused on serving customers with business models that contain elements of usage or consumption rating. It also serves customers across a broad set of geographies, despite only having one US-based office (though it has global employees).

Configurability is the strength of this platform. It supports a broad set of use cases out of the box. If a use case isn’t supported, developers can build it with tools to create custom user interfaces, data models, and workflows. The configurability leads to some challenges: There is a steep learning curve, usability lags, and it’s easy to build unnecessary complexity. Another strength: It’s very good at processing usage data and rating it for billing purposes. Customer references were unanimous in their agreement on this front. BillingPlatform is a good fit for firms where the ability to extend the platform is appealing, especially if usage metering and rating are key requirements.

› SAP’s Subscription Billing works best in an SAP portfolio. SAP’s Subscription Billing solution is part of its Quote-to-Cash portfolio of products under the SAP Sales Cloud umbrella (along with CPQ, Contract Lifecycle Management [CLM], Revenue Recognition, and other solutions). SAP has a long history of building, selling, and supporting billing technology. Its SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management (BRIM — formerly known as Hybris Billing) platform is a fixture in the on-premises realm. SAP has been working on its SaaS billing solution for about four years. It is built to inherit elements from the rest of the Sales Cloud product portfolio; these solutions were not in scope for this evaluation.

SAP has an inspiring vision for the future of its Sales Cloud and Quote-To-Cash products, which include Subscription Billing. SAP has been very deliberately developing the product, integrating it into its portfolio, and bringing customers on board. This deliberate approach is a strength and a challenge. The company has taken its time to roll out the product and make major enhancements, but more than one customer used the term “unprecedented” to describe the level of access to key SAP Billing leadership and the input and collaboration with the product teams. SAP Subscription Billing is a good fit for firms buying or upgrading to S/4Hana or firms having (or planning to adopt) other products in the SAP Sales Cloud, where getting in early with SaaS billing and collaborating with SAP is appealing.

Contenders

› Salesforce CPQ & Billing is a good match for CPQ-forward searches. In 2018, Salesforce launched Salesforce Billing as an add-on to its configure-price-quote (CPQ) product.7 Today, Billing is available to companies using Salesforce for customer relationship management (CRM) and CPQ. Salesforce Billing necessarily inherits a lot of functionality from the rest of the Salesforce product portfolio (e.g., in user roles and permissions, in reporting, or in leveraging Process Builder




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for workflows or notifications), and it benefits from the AppExchange marketplace. This evaluation did not include the inherited functionality in the scope of the evaluation. Salesforce continues to integrate Salesforce CPQ & Billing into its ecosystem. For example, the company’s learning platform, Trailhead, now includes Billing training and a Billing Specialist Superbadge.

Unsurprisingly, Salesforce Billing’s strength is that it lives within the Salesforce ecosystem. Salesforce Billing uses the same objects that Sales and/or Service Clouds and CPQ use, which offloads some of the integration burden from customers onto Salesforce and increases the possibility of automation across the sales and billing processes. Despite its relative newness in the market, customers are placing their bets on Salesforce for this reason. The platform may not be able to support every possible pricing configuration (especially advanced usage or consumption models), but customers are willing to make the tradeoff for the efficiency of staying in the Salesforce ecosystem. Salesforce CPQ & Billing is a good fit if this product search for a billing product is a sales-led initiative, where upstream quoting, contracting, or configuration pains hold equal weight with the adjustments or billing pains.

› Recurly excels at subscription credit card payments and retries; configurability lags. Based in San Francisco, California, Recurly’s claim to fame is its self-service model: Developers can sign up on the website, get a sandbox, and move into production, all without Recurly’s overt involvement. Much of the company’s focus over the last four years has been in its payments optimization and analytics capabilities, specifically around credit card payments. A significant portion of its recently closed Series C round of $19.5 million in venture capital funding will likely go toward further enhancing these capabilities.

Recurly’s strength is its management of credit card payments, both in authorization and in retrying payment failures. It is a strong subscription management solution, but customers with the need for granular configuration or rules around areas like product catalog governance, usage rating, or split billing won’t be a good match. However, its simplicity is part of its strength: Customer references loved Recurly’s transparency and focus on keeping the product straightforward so they could get their subscription products to market quickly. Recurly is a good fit for B2C companies with subscription products — especially if they’re digital products — that need to get to market fast and where optimizing credit card payments and retries is a big focus.

Challengers

› RecVue is a best fit for complicated, multilayered billing scenarios. RecVue was established in 2015 and is based in Palo Alto, California, and its founders previously worked at a systems integration firm focusing on order-to-cash and ERP applications from Oracle and Salesforce. RecVue is built like a heavy-duty pricing calculator to facilitate billing when contracts, commissions, or other requirements are especially layered or dynamic. Despite the company’s relatively short tenure, it counts several very large, established companies among its customer ranks.




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A customer described their requirements as, “You name it, we got it in terms of contract complexity . . . It was difficult to find a platform advanced enough and wide enough to cover our billing scenarios.”8 RecVue was built for that, but almost only that: Its billing product counts on client enterprises to have third-party systems to do heavy lifting elsewhere (e.g., invoicing, collections, dunning, etc.). It’s still a relatively young product, so customers may experience the occasional missing feature or two. Likewise, it’s a young company, so RecVue needs to mature in areas like release management and customer support. But customer references say that, despite being a small group, the RecVue team shows deep commitment to them and their success. RecVue is a good fit for enterprise B2B or B2B2C firms that process high volumes, with complicated rules around pricing or billing, especially — but not exclusively — if they’re using Oracle platforms for finance and accounting.

› Chargify is best for companies with straightforward subscriptions models. San Antonio, Texas-based Chargify offers a subscription billing product that is bolstered by a revenue recognition solution for subscription software sellers (after it acquired Prorata in 2018) and a self-service portal. The bulk of its customers are small to midsize businesses, but Chargify is also seeing traction with larger firms looking for a subscription platform to support smaller business units. Moving forward, it’s focusing its go-to-market efforts on B2B SaaS companies.

Chargify’s product serves subscription businesses well, with support for things like monthly or annual plans with tiers or versioning and trialing. But customers may run into limitations if their product catalog or customer account hierarchy structures are especially layered (e.g., if a parent product and child product reoccur on separate schedules). Customer references love the autorenewal and credit card processing capabilities and reporting around them (e.g., payments, behaviors, and dunning). Chargify is a good fit for small to midsize businesses or smaller lines of businesses within larger businesses that have subscription products and a desire to get to market fast, and where a simple self-service portal is appealing.

Evaluation Overview

We evaluated vendors against 29 criteria, which we grouped into three high-level categories:

› Current offering. Each vendor’s position on the vertical axis of the Forrester Wave graphic indicates the strength of its current offering. Key criteria for these solutions include billing management, automation and amendments management, data and insights, and the platform.

› Strategy. Placement on the horizontal axis indicates the strength of the vendors’ strategies. We evaluated product vision, partner ecosystem, adjoining product strategy, supporting services, and innovation roadmap.

› Market presence. Represented by the size of the markers on the graphic, our market presence scores reflect each vendor’s product revenue, number of customers, revenues under management, and global presence.




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Vendor Inclusion Criteria

Forrester included nine vendors in the assessment: Aria Systems, BillingPlatform, Chargify, Gotransverse, Recurly, RecVue, Salesforce, SAP, and Zuora. Each of these vendors has:

› A SaaS billing product offering. The vendor has a standalone SaaS billing product or a robust billing module built upon a leading SaaS CPQ product.

› At least $1 billion in revenues under management. Each of these vendors processes at least $1 billion in annual transactions on behalf of its clients.

› A focus on the needs of enterprise customers. Five percent or more of these vendors’ customer base has annual revenues of more than $100 million.

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Supplemental Material

Online Resource

We publish all our Forrester Wave scores and weightings in an Excel file that provides detailed product evaluations and customizable rankings; download this tool by clicking the link at the beginning of this report on Forrester.com. We intend these scores and default weightings to serve only as a starting point and encourage readers to adapt the weightings to fit their individual needs.

The Forrester Wave Methodology

A Forrester Wave is a guide for buyers considering their purchasing options in a technology marketplace. To offer an equitable process for all participants, Forrester follows The Forrester Wave™ Methodology Guide to evaluate participating vendors.

In our review, we conduct primary research to develop a list of vendors to consider for the evaluation. From that initial pool of vendors, we narrow our final list based on the inclusion criteria. We then gather details of product and strategy through a detailed questionnaire, demos/briefings, and customer reference surveys/interviews. We use those inputs, along with the analyst’s experience and expertise in the marketplace, to score vendors, using a relative rating system that compares each vendor against the others in the evaluation.

We include the Forrester Wave publishing date (quarter and year) clearly in the title of each Forrester Wave report. We evaluated the vendors participating in this Forrester Wave using materials they provided to us by August 2019 and did not allow additional information after that point. We encourage readers to evaluate how the market and vendor offerings change over time.

In accordance with The Forrester Wave™ Vendor Review Policy, Forrester asks vendors to review our findings prior to publishing to check for accuracy. Vendors marked as nonparticipating vendors in the Forrester Wave graphic met our defined inclusion criteria but declined to participate in or contributed only partially to the evaluation. We score these vendors in accordance with The Forrester Wave™ And The Forrester New Wave™ Nonparticipating And Incomplete Participation Vendor Policy and publish their positioning along with those of the participating vendors.

Integrity Policy

We conduct all our research, including Forrester Wave evaluations, in accordance with the Integrity Policy posted on our website.

Endnotes1 Source: Forrester Analytics Global Business Technographics® Priorities And Journey Survey, 2019.

2 See the Forrester report “Now Tech: Recurring Customer And Billing Management, Q2 2018.”

https://www.forrester.com/marketing/policies/forrester-wave-methodology.html

https://www.forrester.com/marketing/policies/forrester-wave-methodology.html

https://www.forrester.com/marketing/policies/wave-vendor-review-policy.html

https://www.forrester.com/marketing/policies/wave-vendor-nonparticipation-policy.html

https://www.forrester.com/marketing/policies/wave-vendor-nonparticipation-policy.html

http://www.forrester.com/marketing/policies/integrity-policy.html

http://www.forrester.com/marketing/policies/integrity-policy.html





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In fact, some of your existing technology investments may have capabilities that solve some of your billing or subscription management pain points. Learn how the entire technology stack is evolving to support more recurring revenue businesses. See the Forrester report “The Definitive Technology Guide To Recurring Revenue Models.”

3 See the Forrester report “The Forrester Wave™: Recurring Customer And Billing Management, Q3 2017.”

4 See the Forrester report “The Forrester Wave™: Recurring Customer And Billing Management, Q3 2017,” see the Forrester report “Now Tech: Recurring Customer And Billing Management, Q2 2018,” and see the Forrester report “The Definitive Technology Guide To Recurring Revenue Models.”

5 The applications are available in English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish.

6 For example, the product catalog has layered master and supplemental dependencies, as well as governance capabilities, to support the routes customers can take to move from one bundle to another. And its account hierarchies can include devices and device hierarchies embedded within them.

7 Source: Mike Rosenbaum, “Salesforce + SteelBrick: Accelerating CPQ Innovation with Lightning,” Salesforce blog, April 21, 2016 (https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2016/04/steelbrick-salesforce-lightning.html).

In 2015, Salesforce acquired CPQ product Steelbrick, which had acquired invoicing solution InvoiceIT earlier that year.

8 The complete quote reads: “You name it, we got it in terms of contract complexity. We’re doing business in every continent. [We need to support the] structures of the contracts and requirements to deal in every market, [including] multiple sources, resellers, tiers, partners, etc. It was difficult to find [a] platform advanced enough and wide enough to cover our billing scenarios.”






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