Carbonite began in 2005 as the answer to the question: “Why can’t there be an easy and affordable way to backup files online?” Originally a company serving homes and small businesses, today almost 70% of Carbonite’s revenue comes from business customers and 30% from consumers.

In early 2016, Carbonite acquired EVault products, adding hybrid backup and disaster recovery services for larger businesses to their portfolio. One year later, Carbonite expanded into enterprise-grade solutions with high availability technology through the acquisition of DoubleTake.

These acquisitions cemented Carbonite as a one-stop-shop for data protection and propelled their transition from a primarily B2C business to B2B. But this growth through acquisition also left them with redundant systems and inefficient subscription management processes.

They were at a crossroads with their home-grown billing system, ten years in the making. “Our legacy financial processes were disconnected and labor intensive,” says Irwin Weiss, Vice President Information Technology at Carbonite.

They needed a solution to support their core business initiatives, namely:
• “One Carbonite” – Streamline their business and boil it down to a single tech platform.
• Energizing their partner community. Get more out of existing partners and channel communities from acquisitions: more MSPs (Managed Service Providers) to sell higher-priced solutions.
• Cross sell. Quickly go to market in terms of pricing, packaging, and bundling to cross market their wide portfolio of products into their install base.
• Expansion into the addressable market. Offer new products and tech, capitalizing on higher growth areas.

These initiatives led Carbonite to Zuora. They did a deep-dive technical and functional evaluation and found Zuora to be the best fit, in particular Zuora’s ability to support both ecommerce and traditional quote-to-cash through a reseller channel, tight synchronization with Salesforce, and the quality of Zuora as an organization.

“Ultimately our goal is to migrate all of our order transactions through Zuora, regardless of whether it’s for consumer or business, and regardless of channel: direct, reseller, MSP. We want all transactions flowing through the same financial back-end,” says Weiss.

With initial migration under way, they’re already seeing significant business benefits, according to Weiss, including “a dramatic drop in the amount of manual intervention and simplified revenue recognition process… Zuora has allowed us to enable standard customer features that our legacy home-grown system could not provide.”

Says Weiss, “We expect to see increased agility as we move all our business onto Zuora. We anticipate that streamlining our business on the Zuora platform will dramatically improve our processes, reduce IT time, improve our time to market, and increase flexibility in terms of pricing and packaging.”

Today Carbonite is a company with a robust data protection platform and multiple different products for every use case. By focusing on one technology platform, one set of internal systems, and one unified brand, Carbonite is on the path to deliver the cloud data protection platform of the future.