Beagle Research Group, LLC

Zuora and Salesforce.com announced today a new offering that highlights the strengths of each company and delivers new functionality to the telecommunications industry.  Zuora for the Communications Industry is a solution based on the Force.com platform that handles billing, payments and customer care for telco and related industries’ customers.

This makes a lot of sense and, as often happens with Zuora, I am scratching my head wondering why I didn’t think of this.  Here are what I consider the highlights.

Salesforce had a busy week first buying Radian6 for a king’s ransom ($326 large) and then announcing a partnership with Intuit to resell its CRM pre-integrated with QuickBooks.  As I write this there is at least one more interesting announcement in the wings but I am under NDA and not sure when that announcement will be made.  Watch this space.

For me the Radian6 deal is the big news.  I go back to Marc Benioff’s discussion with analysts last month at Cloudforce in New York.  At the time, Marc made the point that the front office represents a great deal of opportunity in the form of new application niches that are still waiting to be discovered and developed.  The Radian6 deal certainly fits into this thinking.