By Laton McCartney

One of the challenges in running a Cloud or Software-as-a-Service company, is managing the complexities of the various payment models in use. Some companies have adopted monthly fees, pay-as-you-go, partial billing periods, and, particularly in the case of startups, a combination of methods.

One cloud startup, Zuora, which is backed by such industry stalwarts as Benchmark Capital and Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff, aims to handle some of the payment heavy lifting for cloud operators.

Zuora's subscription management platform lets customers focus on creating, managing, and growing their core business, not on their infrastructure. Zuora's Z-Billing and Z-Payments products make it fast and easy, the company claims, to launch new products, scale operations, and automate subscription billing and recurring payments in one solution.

Zuora was founded by SaaS industry veterans Tien Tzuo, former chief strategy officer from salesforce.com, and K.V Rao, an early employee of WebEx.

"The world is moving to cloud computing, yet companies are still struggling to make money in the cloud. Zuora powers the Business Cloud and is the only company bringing a flexible, scalable commerce engine to cloud applications and services," said Tzuo.

Zuora claims to have already garnered about 100 customers including Sun Microsystems.

Watch the Zuora presentation at the Under the Radar Conference

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