Cloud subscription management services firm Zuora Inc. today is making what it calls its “biggest product announcement ever” with the launch of the Spring ‘18 version of its Zuora Central Platform.

The Zuora Central Platform is a software-as-a-service offering that’s used to automate businesses’ subscription order-to-cash operations in real time. Organizations use the platform to launch new businesses, shift products to subscriptions, implement new pay-as-you-go pricing and packaging models, gain new insights into subscriber behavior and attempt to disrupt market segments based on new pricing methods.

The company boasts significant customers, including the likes of hyperconverged infrastructure provider Nutanix Inc., cloud computing services firm Pivotal Software Inc., Ford Motor Co. and General Electric Co.

The new Spring ‘18 release packs a bunch of new capabilities for finance and operations teams, including new billing, collections, revenue accounting, deal desk and ordering features.

The headline feature in the new release is Zuora Orders, a new platform product that allows users to more easily manage changes to their customer’s subscriptions and is essential for continued growth, Zuora said. It provides users with unlimited order flexibility, new metrics and complete order-to-revenue automation, among other capabilities.

The ability to manage customer subscription changes requires a “fundamentally different order management solution” capable of handling “mass volumes of complex order changes,” said Tom Krackeler, Zuora’s senior vice president of product.

Zuora Orders provides benefits including greater subscription order flexibility, allowing teams to create multiyear expansion contracts upfront and make unlimited changes to these subscriptions. It also enables something called order-to-revenue automation, which aggregates data collected by the platform to accurately recognize revenue.

The new Zuora Spring ’18 release also sees the general availability of Zuora Collect, a new feature that helps to minimize revenue leakage and caused by ineffective collection processes for recurring payments. Other features include a newly automated workflow service; redesigned subscription order management tools for expanding sales to existing customers; and new capabilities in Zuora billing designed to make invoice settlement easier.

The new Spring ‘18 release comes hot on the heels of Zuora’s first-ever quarterly earnings report filed last week, following its initial public offering in April. The company delighted its investors with solid earnings and positive guidance, helping to boost its share price by more than 7 percent.

“We are powering the entire subscription economy,” Chief Executive Tien Tzuo told SiliconANGLE. “It’s not just software and paywalls and video and music streaming. We’re really the only company offering a suite of software solutions for the subscription economy.”

Image: Zuora/Instagram