Zuora, Inc. announced today that its customer, StackPath, launched a first of its kind edge computing platform, powered by the Zuora Central platform, to enable the $200 billion hardware-as-a-service market. Zuora Billing and the Zuora Central Platform helped to automate StackPath's financial processes, saving the billing team over 120 hours per month, freeing them to focus on future business growth.

"Thanks to the Workflow Builder in the Zuora Platform, our billing team went from manual intervention to fully automated processes for communicating with customers," said Jason Gulledge, VP of Engineering at StackPath. "Reporting is also a lot easier now and we have consistent, accurate data for our new platform, which has simplified our accrual process."

IDC forecasts that by 2025, approximately 80 billion devices will be connected to the internet. The number of devices that will soon demand edge technology is exploding and will include items such as TVs, washing machines -- even running shoes. McKinsey reports that demand for edge computing technologies could create more than $200 billion in hardware value by 2025.

Founded in 2015 as a provider of secure cloud services, StackPath is now trailblazing in the emerging sector of edge computing. Edge computing is an up-and-coming market that is forecast to grow 27 percent between 2017 and 2023 and reach a valuation of over $9 billion. Unlike cloud-computing, which processes data at centralized data warehouses, edge computing involves processing data at locations closer to where it is generated - from autonomous vehicles to mining equipment and military drones.

Following its success as a provider of security-as-a-cloud-service, StackPath launched a wholly redesigned platform - StackPath 2.0, the world's first, and only, secure edge platform.

StackPath has used Zuora Billing since the beginning to manage subscriptions across all of its acquired companies. Since StackPath 2.0 launched, the Workflow Builder in Zuora's Central Platform has powered the growth of the company's new model: edge-computing-as-a-service.

Dedicated to developers, who expect a frictionless experience, StackPath wanted to jettison any back-end, manual activities for a fully automated, self-service system for its customers. The answer was the Workflow Builder in Zuora Central, a tool that helps orchestrate financial operations and trigger external processes such as provisioning, data integrations, and customer communications.

Today, when a customer's action in the StackPath portal impacts billing, it automatically triggers a call to Zuora Central, to make the necessary changes to the customer's subscription. This automation through Workflow has not only shaved 120 hours per month off the billing team's workload, it has also had many downstream benefits for the accounting and compliance teams.

"Because we have consistent data in Zuora, we can spin up a dashboard every hour that the executive team can use to track conversion rates, total lifetime value, and other important subscription business metrics," said Gulledge.

StackPath, a self-proclaimed Zuora Platform "power user," already has 15 customized Workflow automations including fraud protection, payment modification confirmation, and stolen card suspension. These automations help make its billing processes seamless and prepare the company for rapid growth. Just last year, StackPath added 35,000 new accounts, yet the workload required by its billing team was lighter. StackPath can now leave the back-end business to Zuora and focus on its technology goals.

"I wanted to focus my time on the technology that we wanted to build, and not on building a billing system. If you're running a development team and you're using Zuora, you should be looking at Workflow," said Gulledge.