Zuora, the Marc Benioff-backed on-demand billing and payments start-up, has announced what it calls the Z-Commerce Platform, a development platform dedicated to monetizing cloud computing services.

Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo describes the widgetry as the start-up’s most important product announcement to date, “a big step towards our vision of being the de facto commerce engine for the cloud.”

With Z-Billing, Z-Payments, and Z-Force, its existing products, the company’s supposed to have a suite of business cloud solutions focused on driving revenue from cloud computing.

It figures there’s huge market potential for a provider of cloud-based commerce capabilities such as subscription billing and payments given predictions like Merrill Lynch’s that puts the addressable market for cloud computing at $160 billion, including $95 billion in business and productivity applications.

In fact, Zuora claims upwards of 50% of its inbound leads come from cloud computing companies looking for a way to monetize their services. This is what Zuora calls the business cloud.

According to IDC, “payments and billing are two of the thorniest and critical business operational elements facing both new and mature SaaS and cloud vendors.” So a solution relieves a key pain point.

Zuora’s new platform is supposed to work with any cloud computing platform, including Amazon Web Services, salesforce.com’s Force.com and Google AppEngine.

It includes a set of APIs to tap into Z-Billing, Z-Payments, and Z-Force; a SubscribeNow() call to add one-click order processing to any web site; sample code and toolkits for Java, .NET, and PHP; a sandbox environment for developing and testing commerce solutions; and a so-called Z-Store reference implementation, said to be a fully functional web store, complete with source code, that takes subscription orders from a web site and lets end users to manage their subscription and billing information.

There’s also a Zuora developer community site for collaborating around the business cloud and sharing best practices. See http://developer.zuora.com.

Z-Billing is designed for subscription companies. Z-Payments is a complete payment solution for subscription businesses and can accept PayPal payments. The Z-Force billing and payment system is integrated with Benioff’s salesforce.com.

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• Zuora Introduces Business Cloud with Launch of Z-Commerce Platform
• Billing Goes to the Cloud