Zuora helped NCR, a 125-year-old company that made its start selling cash registers to saloons in the Wild West, launch a new tablet-based Point-of-Sale solution to help it compete with the likes of Square.

NCR Silver wasn’t the company’s first experience with a recurring revenue model. In fact, in recent years, recurring revenue had grown to represent nearly 55 percent of NCR’s business.

What was different about NCR Silver is that recurring revenue was the business. It was all cloud-based, with no hardware installs or perpetual licences involved. And for that reason, the launch team sought out a robust, scalable solution that could handle the complexities of electronic subscription billing.

Fortunately the launch team had already seen Zuora in action. Two years earlier, NCR had brought Zuora in “at the 11th hour” to replace an on-premise subscription billing tool that didn’t have the capacity or capability to handle NCR’s needs. The team was impressed with the Zuora solution’s exceptional performance in handling billing for systems and hardware support.

But the main concern behind this particular project was time.

“We had a couple of months to build the NCR Silver business and make the product available to consumers. Without Zuora, we would not have been able to meet the tight time frame,” said Bill Plummer, former Director of NCR Silver.

With Zuora the team hit their launch date with a flexible billing solution that performed flawlessly right out of the gate. Now NCR Silver management can get accurate reporting on previously unknown keystone metrics, such as monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and total revenue per customer (TRC).

And Zuora is paying for itself in other ways. Since initial implementation NCR has freed up at least five FTEs (full-time equivalents) worth of work, allowing them to reassign staff to focus on engaging with the customers as opposed to wrestling with the spreadsheets.