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The Margin is a podcast from MGI Research that explores the evolving world of business monetization. Hosted by MGI Managing Directors Andrew Dailey and Igor Stenmark, the show features candid conversations with founders, CEOs, product leaders, and industry experts at the forefront of pricing, billing, and revenue operations. Each episode dives deep into the strategies, technologies, and trends shaping how companies generate, capture, and grow revenue—from subscription and usage-based models to AI-driven monetization. Whether you're in finance, product, or IT, The Margin offers practical insights to help you navigate complexity and drive growth in the digital economy.
Igor Stenmark: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening and welcome to those of you joining us, perhaps online, in listening in replay mode, or listening to this through our Margin podcast. My name is Igor Stenmark, and welcome to the 2026 Agile Billing Top 50 Buyer's Guide. So this is a preview of MGI 360 ratings for the Agile Billing market. I don't remember exactly what is in sequence, how many we have done but this has become an annual event and it's perhaps our most comprehensive guide of everything else we've published. And in this one, we again feature 50 of the top, as we see it, most consequential suppliers of billing technology. I'm joined here today by three of my colleagues, my co-founder and partner, Andrew Dailey, as well as Elise Talley, who is a Senior Research Analyst, and Ethan Weiss, who is our Research Associate.
Igor Stenmark: In the course of this relatively short session, we will try to share with you some of our findings, some of our research, and offer some guidelines. If you are a buyer of billing software, potential buyer, evaluating a new or re-evaluating existing relationship, if you are a supplier of technology in this area, or an integrator, or perhaps an institutional investor looking to create value, this event is for you. We welcome your questions, and we always love to hear from you.
Igor Stenmark: So, to start. For those of you who are maybe not familiar with MGI and may be attending this for the first time, who is MGI Research? We are an independent, technology research and advisory firm. We're industry analysts. We focus on disruptive tech, things like AI, for example. Monetization. But we have a particular focus in enterprise software, in particular strength in this area, and then specifically within enterprise software on areas what are commonly called Office of the CFO, or monetization, so anything that touches money in an enterprise and needs to be automated is a subject of our research.
Igor Stenmark: We work with three core audiences. We serve the needs of technology buyers, technology suppliers, and technology institutional investors. In the course of a year, we talk to hundreds and hundreds of companies. We distill that research and that information into insights and guidelines and ideas that we hope our subscribers and clients can utilize. Commonly, we start most of these events by saying, why are we here? Why are we still here? How is this day any different from any other day? And we've been covering billing pretty much since… almost since the day we were founded in 2008.
Igor Stenmark: Why is billing still important? Perhaps, why is it more important now? And with everything that's going on in the industry with, with the quest to leverage AI and create strategic advantage, as companies hope to do. Billing has quietly become one of the hidden items that every company is going to have to re-examine in very short order. Why? Well, billing really determines how fast you can go to market on almost anything. It's not enough to have a product and roll it out and demonstrate it. How are you going to invoice and collect money and really manage, like, an economic relationship with your customers? Legacy billing systems that have been around for many, many years have often become kind of a barrier to entry and barrier to speed to market.
Igor Stenmark: But they can also be the foundation that, companies can really rely on and trust to allow them to sort of build confidence in their financial reporting, financial statements, and ensure that the relationship of the customers is not built around things that really result in billing disputes. Billing is often seen as basically a back-office discipline. But in reality, it now spans the front office, middle office, back office, where there are lots and lots of points of integration, and quote-to-cash is no longer really a back-office discipline. So that's something pretty important. AI has really put a spotlight on billing again. Many companies were experimenting with AI, realizing that we will have variable pricing, a variety, as we call multi-model monetization. We're going to have usage and subscriptions, and tiered pricing and volume purchasing agreements, and we're reexamining again if billing systems that are in place are really able to stand up. For one, we believe that every company's billing system, monetization stacks, all those things are going to be coming under stress in very short order, if not already.
Igor Stenmark: So why is that? We also always used to say, every company is now a software company, because everybody sells a software component of their products somewhere and now, essentially, every meaningful AI initiative is becoming a monetization initiative because you have to be able to not only provide a proof point where technologically, your products that contain AI can really work and generate ROI, but you have to be able to monetize those offerings kind of get your return and actual return on investment. And in the process of doing that, organizations will be reselling tokens, reselling API calls, we're going to be remarketing some GPU or TPU consumption, inferences, outcome-based pricing in some cases, credits, coupons, there's a lot here. And the state of AI billing today is unfortunately still not, anything that we can be proud of. It's non-transparent, and it's got a long distance to go.
Igor Stenmark: And to do this well, both the leading companies of the in this space and the AI companies are realizing that they will need to invest significantly and are investing meaningfully in this area. So, Elise, do you want to maybe run through some of the key findings?
Elise Talley: Yeah, definitely. So throughout this report, again, we were talking to all the different billing vendors, really trying to understand what's going on in this market and where it's headed five years from now. And so one of the really big takeaways was every platform needs to support usage billing. Five years ago a handful of billing vendors were offering usage billing, and today, especially as a result of AI, nearly every company is attempting to adapt usage capabilities, and therefore, they need to be able to monetize AI using usage billing functionality. So, for vendors, this means offering quick time and ideally, real-time usage capabilities, and we see this as being table stakes today, where it wasn't necessarily that way five years ago. And I think we'll get a bit more into this, but with some of the recent acquisitions of Stripe acquiring Metronome, Salesforce acquiring m3ter, and Orb being acquired by Adyen. I think it's really just showing this is even more important, and the idea of whether you're going to build or buy, you do need usage billing functionality.
Elise Talley: As a second thing, AI is creating this new generation of billing complexity. This goes hand-in-hand with the whole idea of usage billing being table stakes, but AI is really reshaping not just how software products and services are being built but how they're being packaged, priced, and sold. So we're seeing all these new commercial models based on tokens, API calls, GPU consumption, credits, outcome-based pricing, and all these pricing structures weren't quite as normalized as they were five years ago. And therefore, a lot of these different subscription billing systems weren't necessarily designed to support these. And so, yeah, we're really seeing this increase in billing complexity that's going to really push vendors to keep up with the pace of that. And for both vendors and for users, we're seeing AI monetization as this really key business transformation. And the key challenge isn't just going to be building AI products but really ensuring that your organization is ready to monetize your AI products.
Elise Talley: Third, vendors are racing to own the monetization stack. So, where in the past we've always seen these different traditional boundaries between pricing, CPQ, billing, payments, CLM, and RevRec, other areas that we do cover and produce ratings on. We're sort of seeing that the boundaries there are disappearing a bit. And so the acquisitions I just mentioned, but we also saw DealHub acquire Subskribe, and in this ratings process, we saw a lot of different companies expanding. We saw Maxion, Chargebee expanding into CPQ. It illustrates this broader shift towards very complete, unified revenue platforms. And for buyers it's pretty clear why you would want that. There's less integrations, the data flows more consistently, you're just overall getting a more connected quote-to-cash process. But at the same time, we always caution against weighing the benefits of that flexibility versus what best-of-breed platforms do offer. And that flows, I think, really nicely into our fourth point, which is that the sweet versus best-of-breed distinction is blurring. So, five years ago, best-of-breed vendors generally always won when it came to who has the most sophisticated billing capabilities and who's handling the greatest volumes and highest complexity.
Elise Talley: But today, we're seeing different ERP vendors and quote-to-cash platforms that have really improved and been investing in their billing offerings. And so we're seeing them move into markets more clearly, and we're seeing some of these different smaller vendors that are still very focused on billing, but they're also trying to add on different additional capabilities, whether that might be RevRec or quoting. So, we really see that line blurring, and, for users, especially, and buyers. I think it just goes back to what we're always sort of giving really big importance to, which is use cases, and identifying your ideal customer profile, and ensuring that a vendor is ready to meet that specific to billing, whether or not they offer you several other things.
Elise Talley: And last but not least, agility is, once again, the monetization battleground. So, in the past we've always seen this sort of focus on operational efficiency and sort of ensuring that you're ready to automate manual processes and reduce areas that are too manual, and right now, it's sort of shaping— it's a similar conversation, but it's a bit different in the sense of it's how quickly can we launch a new business model, and how ready are we to monetize for AI, and how quickly can we adapt our business? So, we really see that as an increasing importance as we head into the next few years of billing. Igor, to you.
Igor Stenmark: Yeah, especially with AI, just to follow up on your last point. Lots of companies want to run simulations of what both billing and revenue will look like. If they experiment with different sets of prices and different packages, and so agility in the product is much more important now, not only for small and medium-sized businesses, but even for large enterprises, where they want to be able to do the same kind of thing, same kind of highly competitive iterations. Ethan, Andrew, feel free to jump in. We'll move to the next.
Igor Stenmark: So, there is the market against all this backdrop, so, first of all, we hear questions about AI billing, AI monetization. How do I do this? Pretty much every day, no. Started being once a week, once every few days, now pretty much every day, this question comes up. And it comes up from organizations that are purely buyers of technology. And those who are now sellers of technology, and also ones that are sellers of technology, we're also buyers of technology now as well. And, for a period of time, and I think it's still continuing, but it's probably going to run its course, a lot of… when we would describe this as a potential problem, that real problem, the response has been, oh, I think it's already in our finance stack, we already got it covered, we have ERP product, we have 10 different billing systems, I'm sure it's already covered. But is it really covered in the same capability?
Igor Stenmark: Context as being able to do usage billing and being able to show transparency. Mostly not. Companies do believe, perhaps erroneously, that this is pretty easy. This is pretty easy to attain, pretty easy to buy, because there's so many vendors saying that there is usage billing capability in their product stacks that they see it as a checkmark item. Okay, usage billing, check, done. Next. Or we can build it. We can vibe code it. You know, my cousin vibe-coded a CRM system for his plumbing business. Congratulations. Right? So there's a lot of, kind of, misinformation that's floating around. Can you VIP code billing? Of course you can. We've shown it, we've proven it, we've taken a stab at this, and we're able to stand up a billing system within less than a day. But is it the kind of billing system that can really support even a medium-sized enterprise, or even a small enterprise of some level of complexity? The answer almost always is no. And in organizations that are kind of looking at this, we often find themselves in this problem state kind of post factum. So they dive in at first.
Igor Stenmark: We're going to roll out, the board is pushing us to roll out AI-based capability, we have a couple of developers, a couple of product managers, we're going for it. There's nothing wrong with that. And then we'll figure out the building process, the monetization. pricing, revenue management, so that's pretty common. So, that's not necessarily unusual. It's not what should happen, but that's what is happening, so we've also seen quite a bit of market consolidation, and Elise hinted at this just earlier. So, if you look at just even vendors that are covered in this report that just came out, you know, there's a lot of money changing hands just in things that have been trackable or somewhat announced. You've got NEC, which is really Netcracker, they bought CSG, which owns quite a number of billing solutions, including one that's a cloud-based product that's included in this report. Stripe bought Metronome, for allegedly about a billion dollars. Amdocs bought a company called MATRIXX, which deals with conversion charging. By the end, bought Orb, reported number was $335 million. We think the actual purchase structure is much more complex, but still, it indicates real commitment. Salesforce purchased m3ter, the amounts were undisclosed. We think that this adds significant capability to Salesforce. And the amounts are probably somewhere in the range of $200 million, $150 to $250 in that range. DealHub purchased Subskribe, which also added significantly to their capability stack, and HubSpot earlier bought Cacheflow, and there's actually many more deals than that. For example. SOFTRAX, and where a private equity firm bought BluLogix, which is a well-known enterprise billing solution. So we have made it more like that, and we think the pace of those is going to accelerate.
Igor Stenmark: Why is this important? For a couple of reasons. One, it shows you that very smart teams with lots of money and lots of development capability when it comes to monetization and billing, and in many cases, specifically usage billing and pricing. We are not building, we are buying. Can we be building themselves? We could, but we chose consciously not to do that and spend reasonably large amounts of money to do that. So that's… that certainly is a fact. Second dimension to this, if… for you, those of you who are in the buying side. This is a signal that as you do your diligence and you do your vendor research. Try to understand that most of the vendors you talk to potentially can be an acquisition target. And while that may not necessarily be a bad thing, in many cases it's a good thing. It would disrupt your internal setup, and how you do things, and commitments that have been made to you, may not necessarily be always met, and so on. So that's something to definitely pay attention to.
Igor Stenmark: Okay. Andrew, do you want to cover the conundrum here?
Andrew Dailey: Yeah, one of the… two other quick points on the previous slide. One is, you saw that Cloud Coach, which is a player in the PSA space, picked up just on which is one of the most agile Subscription billing products out there and we're going to see more M&A activity in this space, including more deals, more acquisitions by a number of the companies that you see on that slide. So, the amount of consolidation and merger and acquisition activity is going to continue, not slow down. Specific to the AI conundrum, it's really interesting. There's a lot of activity taking place on the vendor side, and it's easy when you see inside the labs and the capabilities that companies are working on, it's very easy to get excited about the possibilities of what AI can bring to this space.
Andrew Dailey: When you look at it from the buyer's point of view, there's a wide… a massive gap between what the vendors are talking about, and actually where users are in terms of their adoption. And the adoption rates are actually very, very low, specific to adopting AI in billing. It's going to take some time for the billing suppliers to bring all of the AI capability up to where it really needs to be, in terms of the precision that needs to be in place when it comes to billing. The risk for users is it's easy to sit back and say, let's take a pause and not do anything. And we think that's a real risk, because when you think about doing anything around billing and monetization, it's a minimum of a six-month to nine-month kind of endeavor. And when you look at how fast things are moving, with AI, If you're doing nothing today, it means that a year from now, you're going to be at a real competitive disadvantage.
Andrew Dailey: So that's one of the kind of conundrums that we see. The other one is a lot of the suppliers have kind of over-rotated around promoting AI capabilities and stepped back from pushing and promoting messaging around core business value. And at the end of the day, users, buyers, really care about business outcomes. And whether that business outcome is delivered by a train of trained monkeys or provided by AI, it doesn't matter. So the messaging really needs to reorient towards what are the tangible financial outcomes that can be delivered. And if AI is a part of that, that's wonderful. Investors like to hear that. But at the end of the day, what's going to move deals is really providing users with real business benefits.
Igor Stenmark: Yep. So, we definitely are very excited about what we've seen as Andrew described it, from in the labs, what many of the vendors I'm working on, and what we have seen is really kind of fundamental transformations of capability that would have taken under old systems, perhaps months, years, in so many cases, and now you can accomplish that in days or even hours, at least in conceptual form. But at the same time, for users, we need to understand what's a reasonable, realistic ROI in less of geological time. Essentially, we are looking for an IRR that's, sustainable. So, everyone is looking for a payback cycle that's less than, say nine to 12 months, ideally six to nine months, not longer than that. If you have an ROI of 400% in five years, that's actually not going to be as interesting, because the risk is too high, going forward the results that people are getting with AI are actually somewhat uneven.
Igor Stenmark: Talking about the vendors, right now, in some cases, they describe to us fantastic outcomes, and in some cases, we're saying, we tried doing this particular process, let's say, reconciliation, we do it with Gen AI, and when we do it, say, with machine learning, with a little bit of Gen AI, and a difference in prices, like 10 to one, and precision, and the outcomes are kind of marginal in this case. So something to keep in mind, that just because AI is in doesn't mean that all the other approaches and all the other methodologies are no longer valid. So, this is something that we've tried to educate the market about. Question always comes up, doesn't GenAI replace, and when you fill in the blank, a software discipline, in this case, billing? The answer is no. GenAI can augment billing, can create new capabilities, can add value, but at the core, it cannot really… as a… probabilistic mechanism it doesn't have a way today, anyway, and probably for foreseeable future, to replace billing as it stands.
Igor Stenmark: It's one of those disciplines where absolute precision is an absolute requirement. It's like backup. It's binary. It's either accurate or not. And if it's inaccurate, you're taking unbounded kind of risks. So even if you have a 0.1% billing error, I mean, many of the deterministic systems have higher error rates than that. That's also unacceptable, but I think Gen AI kind of puts a spotlight on that, and the actual error rates can be significantly higher than that, and it has been tried. And so that's something that is not in the cards for now. But a lot of the suppliers, and some of the users, will leverage Gen AI productively to create code, deterministic code. That can provide great outcomes. So, that's something to keep in mind. Guys, feel free to jump in if I miss anything. Elise, maybe you can take us through a, kind of a layup of what's… so the report is published. Maybe I forgot to mention it in the beginning, but the billing guide is out. It's available to subscribers today for download. There is an executive guide, executive summary that's available for registration. Elise, maybe you can take us through what's in the guide this year.
Elise Talley: Yeah, yeah, so as Igor mentioned, you'll all receive an executive summary at the end of the webinar today. And yeah the report, it covers a lot of what we always try to make sure is in our reports, which is everything a buyer needs to know to make an informed decision on buying a billing vendor in 2026. And so, it's our annual Top 50 Billing Buyer's Guide. There are 50 vendors covered. There are 34 rated, with 16 honorable mentions, and we have our four famous MarketLenses included. This really goes into everything from Gen AI and innovation in billing. Again, we really wanted to make sure that if you're a buyer, you know what's going on across the market with AI, and what questions to be asking vendors as a prospect to make sure that a vendor is handling what you need them to handle but is also preparing for the future. We also go into what success versus failure looks like, a lot of the key market trends that we've gone into today, how to budget and resource for a billing product, and we go into our AMP, which is Agile Monetization Platform of how we connect billing across the whole quote-to-cash flow. How to find the right vendor for your use case, selection strategies and best practices, and our Agile Billing forecast, which will be getting updated later this year.
Igor Stenmark: Alright. So, there are literally thousands of vendors out there that provide billing solutions globally and we actively track, I forget what, about 100 plus of those, and 50 of those are in this guide. And the reason we're in this guide is because we think we are most consequential suppliers, potentially most interesting suppliers. Not to say that the other hundreds of them are not interesting or worthy, but these are the ones that really address more than one use case, and have broad customer base, have interesting teams, have interesting technology, and are really, kind of, in our point of view, going places. So, the 34 with Elise mentioned earlier, are rated, and then there are 16 that are written up as an honorable mention. We do have a lot of research beyond 50, but here, so if there's somebody that you are looking at who is not on this list. Feel free to reach out, and we'll let you know if we have anything available on them.
Igor Stenmark: We often bring up, kind of, AMP as a reference model, because it's important to understand that billing does not, exist in isolation and doesn't operate in isolation, but it really relies on things like mediations and payment processing and automated revenue management, or FRAC, but it interfaces with CRM and commerce systems, with quoting systems, CPQ, with financials and taxation. So, these are all of the different elements, and now with AI, a lot of its interfaces are now finally coming to life in a much more robust fashion. For example, contract management. Lots of companies now experimenting with trying to interface contracts and billing to try to find gaps and revenue leakage, and a few vendors have come up that are trying to address this specific opportunity, like X Factors, in a few hours. So, AMP sort of remains our overall reference model, and a way for you to benchmark where do you stand, and how old some of your components are, and what needs to be addressed. Elise, maybe if you can talk about the methodology, and then we can get into actual raising results.
Elise Talley: Yeah, for sure. Our methodology is quantitative in nature, it is the only quantitative ratings model in the market, and it's definitely a tougher scale, and the way we do it is across roughly 150 different, quantitative pillars. We are ranking vendors based off of five pillars: product, management, channel, strategy, and finance. And so, across these with the product, it's really how strong the product is competitively, how innovative is it. Management is how competent and experienced the management team is, how effective they are at sort of managing their team and also navigating this competitive landscape. Channel is how complete is their sales channel? How effective is their sales team and partner network? Strategy is, does the company have a realistic view of the opportunity and a compelling strategy for success? And Finance score is very objective in nature. It's growth rate, profitability, company size, cash-to-debt ratio. Yeah. Igor, if you want to go on the next slide.
Igor Stenmark: Yeah, so this, as Elise mentioned, this historically has always been a very, very tough scale. It's difficult to do really, really well on this scale. You have to be really exceptional. So, it's a zero to 100 scale. Each category is worth 20 points, equally weighted. And historically, the scores in billing ranged anywhere from, like mid to low… mid to high 20s to, low 60s. So a lot of companies score somewhere between, say, 45 and 55, and that's a very, very solid score. And there's a few that score about 55 and 55 to 63, 64, and as you get closer to that low 60s range, those are really… we're really strong performers. What makes a company very strong, and how do we get high scores here? Those that have larger channels benefit. Those that have more mature management team, teams benefit as well. Finance growth is very important. Financial health is very important. Product is important, but product is only a part of it, and not even with just the technical part, but really the ecosystem of a product, the track record of a product between business, what the references are saying, what the partners are saying about you, how is overall, kind of, perception of the product in the market. So it is a pretty tough scale, and, if you guys have any questions about it, feel free to reach out. We also rate companies based on the results. We then subdivide them into quartiles, and the top quartile gets an A, second highest gets B+, B, and then B minus.
Andrew Dailey: Just to add to that, Igor, if I can, one thing that matters a lot is really consistency. Consistency of the team, consistency of execution in the roadmap. Consistency in the messaging and alignment of messaging to what's actually in the product, and then consistency of results. And ultimately, this methodology is really a way of assessing risk of suppliers. It's not the only thing that organizations or buyers should look at in terms of assessing suppliers, but it's one of the key indicators that should go into an evaluation process.
Igor Stenmark: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And ultimately, the core of our work in USEA research work is field research. The way that we look at everything, so we absolutely do want to hear from the vendors directly and hear from management teams, from founders, from technical teams, from marketing and sales teams, and finance professionals. But ultimately, we go and talk to the users, the buyers, use the products, and what they say, and what the integrators say. Those are the things that are really paramount in the overall evaluation of a company.
Ethan Weiss: And one thing I'd like to add before we move on…
Igor Stenmark: Go ahead, buddy.
Ethan Weiss: One more thing, with everything we've said today, and Elise's points from earlier in this conversation, a higher score does not automatically mean that it's the best solution for you or a specific company. Identifying your use case, what your ideal customer profile is, how those things align ultimately, is what should be guiding your decision, and our scoring and our research here is to help you kind of guide through that process and narrow down your selections.
Igor Stenmark: Yeah, absolutely key point. If you go online, if you're a subscriber, and you open up any of the readings, one of the… you'll see an opinion piece, you'll see a company backgrounder. Some profile of customers and competitors and so on. But most importantly, you'll see an ideal use case for this product in this particular market. And if that's a match, great. The rating is just a risk measure as Andrew said. And if it's not a match, then it doesn't matter. Like, move on. Like, it doesn't matter how high the rating is, or how low it is, it really doesn't matter at all. Elise, back to you.
Elise Talley: Yeah, so diving into some of the scores, overall, Zuora came in first for this Agile Billing Ratings, for the 2026 Agile Billing Ratings. Our top five is rounded out by BillingPlatform, SAP, Oracle, and Stripe. And as it says on the side, most improved went to Zuora, RecVue, and Gotransverse, and a few of our key additions are Orb and Zenskar. And so I think a few different key things to note that aren't necessarily on this graphic but are important. Overall, the average score across all 50 companies, or I guess all 34 rated companies, came down slightly, and that is really, I think reflective of a mix of innovation and how we really feel innovation the baseline, the floor, has notably increased related to some of the different things we've discussed today, and we really feel like a lot of vendors are struggling to keep pace, especially when it comes to what customers are actually using and adopting. And actually, when we look at it, the biggest reason for score increases or decreases was related to finance score. So, we looked at someone like Zuora, who went private and became increasingly profitable. And we saw several others who are focused either on profitability, growth rate, paying down debt, and that really did have a significant impact on how risky it is to invest in that company, as Igor was mentioning. Similarly, we saw several companies whose finance scores decreased in big ways. And I think that's reflective of a more competitive market, buyers are cost-conscious, they want to see an ROI, and several vendors, in terms of their growth rate and customer acquisition, really took a hit.
Elise Talley: Again, yeah, product scores were largely unchanged. We consistently, we're telling different vendors, if you stayed roughly flat, then you should feel pretty good about where your score is. A handful increased, but many decreased, and again, that's really related to just keeping pace with AI. But also, what Andrew was mentioning about we're seeing a lot of marketing hype around AI, but not necessarily a lot of customer adoption. And so, for this rating cycle, we didn't just place importance on what vendors told us or what's going on in R&D. We really cared about real outcomes and users actually using the latest updates and the AI functionality and getting tangible results from that. I think the other thing we consistently heard from vendors was, oh, there's only a few positive outlooks. How do we get a positive outlook? And I think this goes back to what Igor was saying about consistency, and we really place a big importance on consistent execution, consistent team, consistent innovation, and so there are five positive analyst outlooks for this rating cycle, and generally to be bumped up to a positive analyst outlook. It's not just a year where we think you're really great, it's several years of really consistent execution across all five pillars of the business. Igor, anything you'd like to add?
Igor Stenmark: Yeah, I mean, I think this has become a much faster-moving market, and it's probably going to force us to do more mid-cycle updates, I'll give you an example. So, Oracle still kind of made it into a top five but we are somewhat concerned about, essentially what happened to a bond rating, with debt rating recently, where, it's essentially at the edge of being junk status, because we borrowed so much money to finance the AI initiatives, and, you know, it's a little disheartening to see a company kind of take such high risks in this size, so we're going to keep watching it, and that affects both Oracle as well as Oracle NetSuite rating. We've seen Stripe really move up quite a bit, growing in size, also, acquisition of Metronome, has given them additional capability that kind of go… extends the range. The core billing product that Stripe had before Metronome remains, essentially, an SME developer-oriented solution. Metronome gives it more performance and more capability, in some enterprise contexts, but it still is a long distance to go.
Igor Stenmark: Interestingly, as far as we understand, Stripe internally is not using any of those for the internal billing or payments processing as a data point. We think that there's a lot of new entrants in this space that are interesting, some are rated, some have gotten honorable mentions, but AI essentially is germinating this new crop of potential entrants that really have interesting things to say, or a company like Zenskar just came out, essentially another meta tag-based solution, similar to building platforms somewhat, but for a smaller use case. Anyway, Andrew, Ethan, feel free to jump in, we'll move on to the next, so we can keep on pace here.
Andrew Dailey: No, let's keep going.
Igor Stenmark: Alright. At least I'll hand the controls back to you here.
Elise Talley: Yeah, so, as mentioned earlier, we have four distinct MarketLenses. You're currently looking at the go-to-market versus solution strength graphic. So just to give a bit more context. On your x-axis, you have solution strength, which is really the product score, and then on your y-axis, you have go-to-market strength, which is the composite score of the other four pillars. So that's Finance, Management, Strategy, and Channel. So this is really a way to look at how we talk a lot about product, and understanding who's innovative, which products we find to be the strongest for a variety of reasons. And then really comparing it to their ability to execute from a go-to-market position. So, Zuora really has that top spot in terms of go-to-market, and we look at BillingPlatform, whom we felt really strongly about their product this year. And again, you're seeing sort of those top five companies, Zuora, BillingPlatform, SAP, Gotransverse and LogiSense, round out a bit of that top quadrant.
Igor Stenmark: Yeah, just a quick note about, kind of, impact of AI. So, companies that have had consistently strong architecture and really well bought through, kind of data structures in place, those are the ones that are really going to benefit from AI first. And I think one of the reasons when BillingPlatform is able to move up on the product side is they always had a very strong product architecture, and that, when superimposing AI or that… I wouldn't say it's easy, but it generates outsized returns. So those companies would have strong architecture, a real benefit first from AI.
Elise Talley: This is one of our three ACV lenses, so this is agility versus complexity. So, agility really focuses on how Agile the product is, how easy it is to stand up and maintain once the system is fully implemented. And then on your x-axis, you have the ability to handle complexity, so more complex billing and invoices versus very just rudimentary, capabilities. So you have someone like Stripe, who is on your far-left side, really not a solution that's meant to handle very high complexity, but for a lot of small to mid-sized businesses, it's a moderately agile solution and really handles what you need it to handle. And then sort of in that middle top area, you have two companies, JustOn and Recurly, that are very agile solutions, very easy to maintain and get and to stand up quickly. And then you see to the far right, BillingPlatform and Monetize360 who really excel in terms of complex billing use cases, and for a lot of larger enterprises, they really stand out for that.
Igor Stenmark: And then there's a couple that are on the kind of far right, that you can guess who its vendors are, but two large vendors starting with an S and an O. So, but really, it's a combination of interplay between being able to balance complexity, agility, volume. The size of a dot here is really ability to handle volume as well. Okay. Let's keep moving so we can cover, bypass some of these things here, but let's look at some of the kind of bottom line, recommendations we have for buyers. So first, looking at AI, look at it through a strategic lens. What is it going to do for your business? How it's going to really move the needle and create sustainable, differentiated outcomes? Is it going to really give you the edge, what you need, and are you able to maintain that edge afterwards? Or is it something that every other competitor in your space is going to match? So if you're using pricing, and using AI, and you're using AI to enable some of the billing simulations and pricing simulations. That may become very quickly table stakes. Doesn't mean you shouldn't do that, but also always have a strategic hat on.
Igor Stenmark: We are emphasizing, once again, that it's important to prioritize agility, and not just efficiency. Look at your suppliers and sort of try to understand, have them talk to you about their architecture. both the data, product catalog. We've seen a few companies in the recent couple of cycles, notably, Zuora and Maxio. Where they've gone in and completely re-architected their product catalogs, and… and they are now, like, wow, this is, like, a huge change, and this gives us so much more capability we should have done this earlier. So that's very important. What is the vendor's strategy for the next 24, 36 months? Is it aligning to where you want to go? Are they going to remain viable? You should assume that every vendor that you work with potentially can be an acquisition target. Whoever you choose, make sure that there is not just the functional, operating, and economic fit, but there's also a cultural fit, because once you pick a billing vendor, you may have to live with them for a long time. As we often say, the length of an average software company… software, license in the United States relationship is longer than the average marriage, which is seven years. Check references. Make sure that you actually talk to the users and not getting a paraphrased summary of what the user might have said five years ago. So, those are the important ones.
Igor Stenmark: For those of you who attend this, if you want to download the executive summary, use this QR code, and if you want to get… if you're not a client and not a subscriber, and you want to get a full report. contact us at insights@mgiresearch.com. I would be happy to converse with you. Andrew, do you want to say a few words about Signal?
Andrew Dailey: Yeah, first, before I do that, I would say clients should reach out, we'll schedule private briefings to go through the findings in detail. The second thing that I would just, as a comment, mention is that in speaking with users, we talk to not only references provided by companies, but also we go out and speak to partners, other customers that are not provided by suppliers, we really do our homework here. And what's interesting in speaking to so many customers is rarely do they highlight a unique product capability as what really… when you say, what really delivers the most benefit to your business. And in the majority of cases, they talk about the importance of the partnership and the relationship with their supplier.
Andrew Dailey: And as Igor alluded to, and we've been talking about, what's so critical is you really want to find the right cultural fit, because you're going to be working with a supplier very intimately, and over a long period of time, and you really want a team that you can trust that delivers on what they say they're going to do and that you can both achieve the outcomes that you mutually want to achieve. Now, one more thing, we have been working in the background on a platform, a new research platform that we call Signal. And a part of that is Signal Customer Intelligence. So we've been taking all of the interviews that we've been doing in the billing space, and in a number of the other spaces and disciplines in AMP, but specifically in billing.
Andrew Dailey: You now have the ability, through Signal Customer Intelligence, to go and interrogate hours and hours and hours of in-depth, deposition-like customer interviews and these are anonymized, so customers speak freely. They're deep, detailed conversations, so it's not a five-minute fill out a survey, get a Starbucks card kind of thing. It's a deep conversation around where the value really lies. With each vendor, what the sticking points are, what customers would like to see in terms of roadmap. It really opens up a whole new way of thinking about doing vendor evaluations, doing an eval of an existing supplier. And for vendors, it's a whole new way to do product development, to do market intelligence. We think this is going to redefine how organizations think about and conduct market intelligence. And if you want a preview of that, give us a call.
Igor Stenmark: Thank you, Andrew. Alright. On the horizon here, we'll have a couple more webinars, but we already know what the topics are going to be, so August 13th we will take a deeper look at CLM products, so we are in the process of now starting with CLM ratings. And this will be an event where we will unveil yet another new product that helps to understand, kind of comparisons between different, CLM products, but also different classes of CLM products, where there's a lot of attention and hoopla in the market around AI-enabled products. Harvey, Legora, some of them have gotten multi-billion-dollar valuations, some of them have gone from zero to $200 million in revenue in record time, so it's a very interesting space. It's been revived by AI, and we're going to put a spotlight on that. On September 24th, we will do another very interesting event that will delve into the issue of are analysts going to be relevant in the age of AI? Essentially, are we going to work out of our jobs?
Igor Stenmark: So this will be an interesting discussion, no holds barred, and we invite you all to join us. So, lastly, but not leastly, if you are contemplating use of AI in finance, we have started a research series. The first research note on that topic is out. It really deals with how safe is it to do self-driving for AI and finance, and there are at least two free more notes coming out later this year, so stay tuned. With that, we thank you for joining us today. Feel free to reach out. This is our story, we're sticking to it, and we look forward to seeing you at our next event. Thank you.