This past Halloween was by no means scary for Xactly Corporation, a cloud sales compensation and sales performance management (SPM) provider.  In fact, the day ended up being quite a treat—not only did the company close out an exceptionally strong quarter on October 31, 2012, but it also signed its 500th customer. Read the rest of this entry »

During my several years of attending events organized by the cloud computing evangelist salesforce.com, such as Dreamforce and Cloudforce, Xactly Corporation has always had a prominent stand at the expo floor (another fixture at these events has been BigMachines, and not surprisingly the two vendors are close partners). In a nutshell, Xactly’s on-demand software lets sales professionals know, well, exactly what they are getting out of their sales wins.

The company’s flagship software, Xactly Incent, helps sales representatives and other sales professionals determine compensation for sales transactions. Additionally, sales executives can use the company’s analytics software to analyze post-sales information such as what, where, and to whom their product lines have been sold and how profitably.

Read the rest of this entry »

Part I of this blog series expanded on some of TEC’s earlier articles about companies’ need for better commission and incentives calculations and best sales performance management (SPM) practices. It also introduced the latest entry in TEC’s I&CM (Incentive & Compensation Management) Evaluation Center, Varicent Software’s flagship product, Varicent SPM [evaluate this product]. Read the rest of this entry »

A number of earlier TEC articles and blog entries have analyzed the nascent sales performance management (SPM) or enterprise incentives management (EIM) software market, which has also been one of those areas with a significant uptake of on-demand deployments.

Indeed, companies of all size increasingly use software packages for sales compensation and other incentives management, to more accurately and strategically model and forecast commissions and other incentive-based costs and benefits, calculate commissions and bonus earnings, and gain more real-time visibility into employees’ performance metrics. Read the rest of this entry »

Sure, anyone observing the enterprise applications market and still naysaying the bright future of the software as a service (SaaS) on-demand deployment model and closely-related Web 2.0 technologies, is in serious denial or similarly delusional. He/she would sound similar to those lost souls that deny even a remote possibility of a global warming and climate changes, but, oops, this is not a political blog…

Anyway, recent predictions for 2008 by the two ZDNet bloggers, Phil Wainewright and Dion Hinchcliffe summarize well the reasons why these phenomena are not only here to stay, but to even take more slices out of the entire applications market pie. At this stage, I am still reluctant to believe that these advancements will render the traditional on-premise integrated (packaged) applications deployment mode completely obsolete any time soon.

In fact, as I have pointed out some ongoing drawbacks of SaaS applications in my recent series of articles, many comments on these two blog posts talk about similar lingering SaaS concerns. Most notably, there is still a discomfort among some users about their hosted data security and integrity, and what these SaaS vendors (and their hosting providers) can do about being more secure and compliant.

Further, in some malfeasance prone areas like managing sales and partners/channel compensation data, there is a pressing need to ensure higher levels of security and process controls for the purpose of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) compliance. For that reason, most publicly traded companies and other large-scale enterprises initially rejected the idea of SaaS because they thought they needed to take greater responsibility for their own SOX compliance. Read the rest of this entry »