Posted by Divya Ganesh, Senior Manager, Product Marketing, NetSuite

In today’s hyper-competitive marketplace, businesses are in constant “hunting mode” to monetize their offerings and under relentless pressure to launch, build and grow recurring revenue streams as a means to survive. Hybrid business models have emerged as a direct result of this “survival of the fittest” phenomenon. It is the new black. Hybrid is any combination of products, services and subscriptions. Product companies are getting into services, services companies are offering subscriptions, and subscription businesses are getting into products as a means to survive in the marketplace. It’s a fundamental but profound notion.

The networking giant, Cisco provides an interesting example for the hybrid model. Cisco has over 1,700 items or entities in its catalog ranging from services like WebEx that can be subscribed to - to actual physical goods that will need to ship to the customer. This runs the entire Cisco gamut from basic networking equipment like routers all the way up to their flagship, telepresence suite that has a potential price tag in the millions. All of these products are now sold together as a service. A customer can mix and match any of these 1,700 offers in any manner that makes sense for them.

The rationale is simple: businesses are moving away from singular to hybrid models in today’s marketplace. It stands to reason that siloed billing systems that address a singular model are ill-equipped to handle this shift and are quickly collapsing to solutions with billing at the nucleus. In addition, evolving revenue recognition mandates compound the complexities associated with revenue management and underline the business pain for an integrated solution that synchronizes billing and revenue management processes.

A powerful, yet nimble billing solution enables you to launch innovative models in order to maximize revenues, without inflating the cost-structure, all while affording your customer the highest degree of transparency and minimizing attrition.

Read the first episode of the billing blog trilogy to learn why billing has become a strategic function.

Download a white paper to learn more about how billing can bring business agility (opens in new tab).