Market Perspectives

Economic uncertainty has organizations focused on sustained, profitable growth. Ensuring profitability is more complex, however, with mixed-revenue models like subscriptions and usage-based offers. Omnichannel selling brings different costs, and margin is typically examined as a post-sale event when it’s too late to influence profit.

Long a leader in subscription management, Zuora has been deliberately targeting larger enterprise customers over the past couple of years with a more complete offering. Adding to the ability to scale to serve the enterprise market, Zuora has also built robust support for hybrid revenue models, reflecting the desire of organizations to enable mixed-revenue models that accommodate one-time, consumption- and milestone-based sales as well as the needs of omnichannel selling, including self-service. Stephen Hurrell, Research Director leading Office of Revenue, articulated about the importance of supporting a mixed-revenue model and the need for organizations to integrate and automate their processes and systems in this perspective.

In today's market, businesses are facing increased competition and pressure to grow revenue. This is especially true for organizations operating in industries that have been disrupted by technology, such as media, entertainment, retail and travel. In this environment, it is essential for businesses to have a clear understanding of revenue streams and be able to quickly and effectively adjust pricing and sales strategies to capitalize on new opportunities and mitigate risks.

Ventana Research analysts participate in many meetings throughout the year to learn about software vendors’ plans and product updates. We recently attended a meeting with SugarCRM to learn about its new management and direction. Founded in 2004 as an open-source project, the company has recently focused on becoming a full-service customer relationship management vendor.

Sales leadership and operations teams can ensure their most effective outcomes by properly managing territories, quotas and incentives. In that journey, sales teams struggle to reach their full potential if they do not orchestrate their efforts and optimize every week and month of the year. The need for immediate access to up-to-date information shared by sales professionals, managers, operations teams and leadership is critical to meet everyone’s expectations. Unfortunately, most sales organizations are operating with a disparate set of tools and legacy applications that do not facilitate selling based upon territories or quotas and lack management visibility for potential incentives.

The 15th annual Ventana Research Digital Leadership Awards recognize organizations and individuals that utilize technology to advance business and IT. The Awards showcase professional leadership and their use of business applications or technology that led to improved organizational efficiency, productivity and performance. These leaders and pioneers have contributed to their organization’s success and championed improvements across people, processes, information and technology.

While the billing software provider market is well-established and mature, a new breed of vendors has emerged. These applications address billing but, more importantly, enable organizations to adopt advanced digital business models, maximizing existing investments in front- and back-office systems.

The current sales cycle software space is one of complexity. Business-to-business sales across all industries are becoming more complex and require more care in their management. The rise of the subscription economy is one example contributing to this complexity. Buyers are not just buying one product at a time, but rather could be buying multiple products over different periods of time, with renewals on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis.

The annual Ventana Research Digital Innovation Awards showcase advances in the productivity and potential of business applications as well as technology that contributes significantly to the improved processes and performance of an organization. Our goal is to recognize technology and vendors that have introduced noteworthy digital innovations to advance business and IT.