The Rise of Cloud Billing

A recent survey run by Cerillion, polling the views of more than 200 senior IT professionals in the UK across a broad range of industry verticals revealed that more than half of all businesses today (53%) are still using either an in-house-developed system or manual processes to bill their customers. 

At the same time, the results highlighted a clear shift in the way products and services are sold: away from traditional one-off product sales towards a more flexible pricing model based on subscriptions and usage. This shift was highlighted in the survey results, suggesting that one-off product sales are set to decrease by a third, as businesses gear up to embrace the ‘subscription revolution’. 

One-off pricing models are currently used by 84% of organisations but the research shows that this proportion is set to fall to 51% in the future. In contrast, new pricing initiatives built around an on-going service relationship are growing steadily, including subscriptions, pay-per-use and freemium pricing models.

Today, as this white paper demonstrates, we are experiencing a shift in the way consumers purchase goods and services as part of the subscription revolution. The survey results reveal a distinct drop in non-digital products from 56% offering them now, to 45% expecting to continue offering them in the future. Non-digital services follow the same trend dropping from 67% to 58%. In contrast, the proportion of companies offering digital products is set to rise from 39% to 46%, and those offering digital services will increase from 44% to 51%...