Case Study
Build vs. Buy: Why Zuora Chose Prequel
The Challenge
Zuora manages recurring revenue, such as subscriptions, for over 1,000 companies worldwide, including BMC Software, Box, Caterpillar, and General Motors. Its products, which help businesses manage pricing, packaging, billing, customer acquisition, and order-to-cash, generate large volumes of valuable business data.
“We collect all this mission-critical data that our customers need, like which subscriptions their customers are on, ” said Kevin Suer, Director of Product Development at Zuora.
“Our customers have really good tools to analyze that information on our platform,” Suer continued. “But some of our enterprise customers want all of their information in their corporate data ecosystem where everyone can access it, whether or not they have a Zuora login.”
For Zuora, that meant building data export. The vision for the product was a series of connectors, one for each data warehouse, database, and object storage service that their customers might use. The connectors would allow customers to quickly connect to their preferred destination, select the data they want to sync, and receive updates in near real-time.
With the product vision locked, the Zuora team researched three third-party options in addition to building their own solution: data integration tools, open-source products, and Prequel. They scored each option on five dimensions:
- Coverage – How many destinations could the product support?
- Scale – How much data is the product designed to handle?
- Speed – Could the product transfer data to customers in near real-time?
- Security – Could the product deliver all of the security features that our company and our customers require?
- Developer experience – Does the product include tools that will make development easier?
“After deep research, introductory calls with third-party vendors, and conversations with the team, it was clear our best options were either to use Prequel or to build data export ourselves,” Suer said. “We scoped each option and found that, in the time it would take us to build one integration, we could set up every integration we needed with Prequel. Choosing Prequel would greatly accelerate our roadmap.”
“We could deploy Prequel on-premise, inside our AWS cloud, which makes it much easier to ensure that our rigorous security standards are maintained,” Suer continued. “As we dug into the product, it was clear that the Prequel team had thought everything through and made the experience really solid. There wasn’t much our team would have to do.”
The Solution
“We went live about ten months ago. We were able to get up and running quickly,” Suer said. “We offer over a dozen connectors today and send about a billion rows of data to our customers every month.”
Zuora uses Prequel’s Magic Link feature, which allows their customers to set up a connector using a unique link. Customers only need to set up access once, after which the data sync process runs automatically.
“For our customers, it just works,” Suer said. “They get the data they need, where they need it, and they can trust that it’s accurate.”
“The documentation and technical support were very good,” Suer continued. “Our engineering team was able to learn the system very quickly. The Prequel team feels like an extension of our team.”
“Prequel was the right choice. We were able to meet a critical customer need without pulling our engineering team away from higher-value work around analytics and monetization,” Suer said. “Instead of spending months building and maintaining a handful of integrations, we now have a scalable system that supports an entire category of destinations.”
The Impact
