Zuora, a specialist in subscription commerce and billing, has announced that Telecom New Zealand has chosen its subscription eCommerce platform to support the roll out of its mass consumer Big Pipe broadband service.

Big Pipe, one of Telecom New Zealand’s first Telecom Digital Ventures incubator businesses, aims to bring uncapped and no-frills broadband Internet access services to the New Zealand consumer market.

Zuora will provide the organisation with automated billing and a scalable platform to support growth and flexibility in pricing and packaging, collection and accounting of recurring revenue.

Zuora was chosen for its technology with a proven track record in the telecom industry in creating an eCommerce experience, automated billing and payments, and integration with existing back end accounting systems.

At the same time, Zuora's cloud-based service also enables the organisation to manage all billing transactions within New Zealand.

“Uncapped, no-frills broadband is one of the fastest growing segments in New Zealand," says Thomas Salmen, CTO, Telecom Digital Ventures.

"And Big Pipe is our anchor business for Zuora. We knew we needed a platform that was agile, that could automate our back-end processes, and be up and running quickly in order to fast track market acceleration for the Big Pipe business.

"Legacy platforms are simply not agile enough to support fast-growing businesses which require rapid deployment and seamless billing scalability.

"The solution took just 45 days to deploy and integrates with our internal CRM solution.”

For Big Pipe specifically, the consumer sign-up process has been deliberately made as simple as possible.

Big Pipe users Zuora’s flexible product catalogue packaging and pricing capability to initially offer three different levels of consumer broadband Internet services to its customers all of which offer unlimited data usage.

As soon as a consumer clicks on their preferred plan, the Zuora platform takes over, gathering contact and billing information from the consumer.

On completion, customer subscription information is passed to Big Pipe staff for back end processing.

The first invoice is automatically generated by Zuora as soon as the customer's service is up and running. This is precisely the level of automation Big Pipe needed in order to capitalise on high consumer expectations for a great broadband service.

In addition, the Zuora subscription business platform allows Big Pipe to measure and review metrics critical to businesses with recurring revenue business models.

It also provides insight providing up-to-the minute information on customer growth, revenue, collection, churn and financial reporting.

”Within the telecom sector, the shift to the Subscription Economy is opening up all sorts of growth opportunities for network carriers worldwide," adds Greg Cullen, Vice President ANZ Sales, Zuora."At it’s core, Zuora is focused on enabling companies to transform their businesses. In fact, some of the most highly respected telcos in the world are using Zuora to support innovation.

"Telecom New Zealand is no different and exemplifies the possibilities of today’s subscription economy in driving mass business transformation.”

Telecom Digital Ventures is a business unit formed in early 2013 to look at new technologies and the new consumer needs and business opportunities that these will create

Big Pipe is the first Telecom Digital Ventures business to go live on Zuora, however the organisation is expecting to roll out several new services over the next few years, many of which will be subscription services.

“I’m confident Zuora will continue help us drive business transformation in line with our strategy to continually innovate and as each new business is launched on the Zuora platform," Salmen adds.