Zuora Acquires Togai

Zuora Acquires Togai

On April 30, Zuora announced the purchase of Togai, a Chennai, India-based startup with a focus on agile, low-code usage billing.

Togai mainly caters to the developer audience within early-stage growth businesses that seek to leverage consumption-based pricing models. It claims capabilities to rapidly construct usage-based billing rules and has gained a few early customers. Togai is focused on selling to developers, a buying center that Zuora has not prioritized in recent years. The acquisition equips Zuora with a team of developers oriented toward VC-backed usage companies, potentially accelerating Zuora’s access to this market.

Key takeaways

• Togai is made up of a small team of about ten, conveniently located in the same town as Zuora’s India development center.
• The acquisition adds a developer-focused product and team working on a low-code, easy-to-implement usage metering and agile billing solution. Zuora’s plan is to embed the Togai product within Zuora’s existing usage billing and monetization solution.
• This transaction, once completed, could grant Zuora access to a developer-led market segment within emerging growth companies and help Zuora compete more effectively against Stripe Billing and other well-funded usage-billing startups (Metronome, Amberflo, et. al.).
• Given that this deal is largely an acqui-hire, Zuora will still need to work out its go-to-market motion and necessary resources. The acqui-hire opens the door for potential synergies with Zuora’s Zephyr subscriber management offering.

Conga Connect 2024

Conga, the revenue lifecycle management company, brought together over 500 customers, prospects, partners, and employees for its annual conference, held in Dallas, TX on April 22-24.

• Applications running on Conga’s new, cloud-independent technology platform are already reaching functional parity with its Salesforce-native applications.
• As a result, the company and its customers are poised to enter a new stage of growth and maturity.
• What’s next for a reinvigorated Conga?

Conga used the event to tout its new platform, which effectively gives it independence from the Salesforce cloud and positions Conga as a marketplace for quote-to-cash-related applications. New customers now have a choice of cloud platforms and are not required to pay the Salesforce tax by using Conga.

• The new platform is an addition to Conga’s ability to run natively in the Salesforce environment and Conga continues to support and invest in customers running natively on Salesforce.

Within the next six months, Conga will have fully evolved its entire application set (namely Composer, CPQ, and CLM) into one of the most modern platforms on the market.

• Customers – including Coca-Cola, Hitachi, Amgen, and Bosch – and partners presented case studies of new applications running on the Conga platform. These are early examples of Conga’s potential to evolve into a platform marketplace provider with an ecosystem of partner applications developed in and around Conga.
• In CPQ, Conga’s solution remains among the small pool of market leaders that are able to handle tens of thousands of order lines.

Conga also introduced its new CMO, Andrew Bennett, at the event. Bennett comes from Smartsheet, a publicly listed collaboration and project management provider. The CMO seat has been vacant at Conga, so this is a needed addition to the management team.

Zoom out | While the company positions itself as a provider of “revenue lifecycle management” – a subset of MGI’s Agile Monetization Platform reference architecture – it has some distance to travel to give this real punch. The core products today are CPQ, CLM, and Composer – each among the leading solutions in their respective discrete markets. The combined offering has room to grow as critical pieces of the overall AMP framework are either nascent in maturity or missing.

Under the hood | Conga’s re-platforming opens multiple growth pathways and makes it easier for partners to build alongside Conga.

• The company’s AI story is measured – a responsible approach considering the current of state of real market adoption of GenAI (and given prior management’s tendency to over-promise).
• However, CLM and CPQ are both prime beneficiaries of AI’s promise, something Conga’s product teams are acutely aware of.
• For Conga to truly inspire customers and accelerate growth, it needs to shift into a higher gear and bring fresh innovation and solutions to market. This is likely to come via its core development and via partnerships/acquisitions

The Comprehensive Guide to CLM

This Spring, MGI published a comprehensive guide to the Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) space. The CLM Top 35 Buyer’s Guide contains unique research, individual supplier ratings, and guidance to help buyers, suppliers, and investors make sense of a crowded, confusing, and highly fragmented market.

The Buyer’s Guide includes individual MGI 360 Ratings™ for 21 leading vendors in the CLM market, as well as 14 “honorable mention” write-ups for additional noteworthy suppliers.

• 360 Ratings are holistic evaluations of software vendors in a given market. They combine a quantitative 0-100 Rating composed of five equally weighted pillar scores (measuring product strength, experience of leadership teams, channel breadth, marketing strategy, and financial health) with a qualitative analyst outlook (positive, neutral, or negative).
• Icertis is the top-rated supplier in the CLM market with a 360 Rating of 63 and a Positive Analyst Outlook.
• Icertis and Conga are the strongest options for hyperscale use cases, while Agiloft leads in the enterprise market segment. Meanwhile, Ironclad is the top-rated supplier for midmarket CLM requirements, and PandaDoc offers the best SME solution.
• Find individual MGI 360 Ratings here.

The Buyer’s Guide also includes four MarketLens™ charts that plot suppliers by pairs of coordinates measuring product strength, go-to-market capabilities, solution agility, ability to handle complexity, and ability to process high volumes. The MarketLens charts are available by market segment to best help prospective buyers compare like with like:

• MGI MarketLens: Contract Lifecycle Management (overall)
• MGI MarketLens: CLM for Enterprise
• MGI MarketLens: CLM for Midmarket
• MGI MarketLens: CLM for SmallBiz

Finally, MGI also published 21 new Use Case Notes™ covering the ideal customer profile of top-rated CLM suppliers.

• MGI Use Case Notes describe a given solution’s ICP in terms of target customer size, business models, selling regions, tech ecosystems, primary verticals, investment level, and more.
• Find individual Use Case Notes here.

The Use Case Note and 360 Rating for DocuSign are complimentary for anyone who is curious about the format and nature of these evaluations – with or without an MGI Research subscription.

How does your company evaluate new products? One of our goals at MGI is to help vendors articulate their special sauce to prospective buyers in a clear, accurate, and digestible way. Let us know what selection criteria you prioritize when making a new software purchase with this quick, one-question survey.

Webinar Today w/ Dan Brown, CPO/CSO of Certinia

Gen AI promises to accelerate processes, reduce human intervention, and make tasks quicker and easier. For industries like Professional Services that are human capital intensive, the implications and business threats associated with Gen AI adoption are significant – but not straightforward. Charting an intelligent course through the fog of hype and fear requires clear analysis and a longer-term perspective.

Industry veteran and innovator Dan Brown, Chief Strategy and Product Officer at Certinia, will join MGI analysts today at 8am PT / 11am ET to discuss where Gen AI fits into Professional Services Automation – and where it doesn’t.

Key topics:

• The potential impact of Gen AI on margins, revenues, and resources in professional services
• Practical steps professional services businesses can take to prepare for Gen AI adoption
• How Gen AI fits into the Services-as-a-Business (SaaB) business model
• A frank discussion about the pitfalls with current tools – and what PS organizations can do to mitigate their risk while exploring the upside possibilities of Gen AI

Register for the webinar here.