One impression from the recently held SuiteWorld 2013 conference was that NetSuite’s partner ecosystem is becoming extensive – Autodesk and ClickSoftware Technologies being only some of the company’s novel high profile alliances. On the conference expo floor I was able to note several existing configure, price, quote (CPQ) or quote to order (Q2O) partners such as CallidusCloud (which acquired Webcom Inc. in late 2011), Experlogix, and Configure One.

Selectica, a public provider of software that both accelerates sales cycles of configured products and streamlines contract processes, announced at SuiteWorld 2013 the integration of Selectica CPQ with the NetSuite cloud computing platform. Selectica CPQ for NetSuite brings a constraint-modeling interface, patented product and sales configuration engine, and guided selling capabilities to NetSuite’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. Built using NetSuite’s SuiteCloud development platform, the combined solution aims to give sales teams the power to configure more accurate product and service offerings and build faster and more intelligent quotes for customers. Epec Technologies was the first publicly announced joint customer, with many more in the works.

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Coincidentally or not, my industry analyst career started at about the same time that salesforce.com was founded, back in 1999. And boy, has the vocal cloud software company had an amazing transition over the years—once dismissed as a fad-like niche sales force automation (SFA) vendor with glorified contact management capabilities, salesforce.com is now a $3 billion (USD) enterprise software powerhouse. Whether one likes salesforce.com CEO and founder Marc Benioff’s bluster or not, the vendor is now indisputably a member of the elite enterprise applications club, joining the likes of SAP, Oracle, Infor, Microsoft Dynamics, Dassault Systemes, Autodesk, and Sage Group. What more poignant example of the “old school” vs. “new school” contrast could be pointed out than the fact that Obama’s 2012 campaign used salesforce.com to monitor voters’ inquiries in real-time in the cloud while Romney’s 2012 campaign used an on-premises Oracle solution (that famously erroneously predicted a landslide victory for the Republicans).
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Pearson, a global education company, has selected Cameleon Software’s Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) solution as part of a business transformation initiative aimed at enhancing the customer experience. Anticipating the growing need for customized and personalized services, as well as the shift from paper to digital content, Pearson adapted its business processes to the market changes and, as part of its strategy, implemented a CPQ solution. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently released FinancialForce PSA Winter ’13 builds on FinancialForce.com’s commitment to making professional services teams more effective, mobile, and social (having been built on the Salesforce Platform and natively embedded with Salesforce CRM). Winter ’13 is based on enhancement ideas submitted online by the company’s growing community of users via the FinancialForce Community portal that was launched in 2012.

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After engaging in a soul-searching exercise a while back, which has lately resulted with more coherent strategies in some regions, and with the recent public statement of its commitment to making customers happy, Sage Group announced at the opening of trading at the London Stock Exchange on February 15, 2013, that it has reached a definitive agreement to sell Sage Nonprofit Solutions to Accel-KKR, and ACT! and SalesLogix to Swiftpage. Accel-KKR has extensive expertise in accelerating the growth of software companies in vertical industry segments, KANA Software being one example. The investment firm brings a wealth of operational best practices and strategic insight to its portfolio companies and is a good partner to help these businesses reach their full potential.

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Informatica Corporation, an independent provider of data integration software, recently acquired Active Endpoints, a private business process management (BPM) provider.

As a public company with over $800 million in annual revenue and over $500 million in cash, Informatica seems to be a great new home for Active Endpoints’ technology and customers. Not only will Active Endpoints technology be integrated throughout Informatica’s product line, but Informatica pledges to continue to support every ActiveVOS BPM customer and partner (although the jury is still out on whether Informatica can deliver, given that BPM has not been its core competency). Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, FinancialForce.com, the cloud applications company formed as a joint venture between UNIT4 and salesforce.com, announced the availability of trust.financialforce.com, a resource for customers that describes the control processes, security, application quality, and platform monitoring environment that underpin all FinancialForce.com cloud business applications. Built on the Salesforce Platform (a.k.a., Force.com), FinancialForce.com applications inherit all the benefits of the investments made by salesforce.com in infrastructure, data management, controls, security and certifications including SysTrust, Truste, VeriSign Secured, Safe Harbor, SAS70, and ISO 27001. Read the rest of this entry »

TEC’s recent article Rootstock Software Steps Out on Force.com outlined the genesis of Rootstock Software and its cloud-based ERP offering. Rootstock Software and FinancialForce.com (a joint venture between UNIT4 and salesforce.com) announced a partnership earlier in the year to deliver a comprehensive manufacturing and accounting solution on Force.com. Rootstock is vying for its ERP solution to become the standard for manufacturing ERP solutions in the cloud, as discussed in the aforementioned recent blogpost all about Rootstock, looking at the background and capabilities of the Force.com-fortified solution. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my recent blog posts talked about the emergence of a few natively cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions that leverage salesforce.com’s Force.com platform. But looks might be somewhat deceiving here—while the products might be brand new and hosted on the latest cloud architectures, their owners and founders have been around the ERP block a few times before.

Take Rootstock Software’s co-founders Patrick “Pat” Garrehy and Chuck Olinger for example. They each have over 35 years’ expertise building software for complex manufacturing environments (Lockheed, Solectron, etc.). I’ve known them for over a decade, since, prior to Rootstock, they were involved with Relevant Business Systems. That ERP product, now part of Aptean after the recent merger of CDC Software and Consona Corporation (the latter in turn acquired Relevant ERP back in 2006) has had a couple of incarnations within Relevant Business Systems (at some stage also called INFIMACS).

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CallidusCloud’s CPQ (formerly Webcom’s Websource CPQ) has long been part of AppExchange, helping to automate and accelerate the quotation and proposal generation process for sales teams and channel partners. CPQ (configure, price, quote) accelerates sales cycles across companies, ranging from those with simple product catalogs and distribution models all the way to complex, multi-channel sales networks.

The real news here is the product’s much tighter security and integration with salesforce.com. Read the rest of this entry »

BigMachines announces that BigMachines Express is now available on the Salesforce.com AppExchange. This solution targets small and medium-sized businesses that want to create product profiles, assign desired prices, and further generate proposals in Salesforce CRM. The solution is built on the Force.com platform, which allows for easy installation and configuration for Salesforce CRM users. The solution will be showcased at Dreamforce, September 18-21.

Part 1 of this blog series introduced Xactly Corporation, a provider of fully multi-tenant, software as a service (SaaS)-based solutions for sales performance management (SPM). The article also provided the bullish vendor’s genesis since being founded in 2005 and its current state of affairs. This article will feature my recent conversation with Xactly’s founder and CEO Christopher Cabrera.

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Sugar CRM announced the latest version of its customer relationship management (CRM) solution at Sugarcon 2012, its annual conference. After the event, I had a very interesting conversation with Jan Sysmans, senior director of product marketing, and Chris Bucholtz, editor-in-chief of CRM Outsiders, and would like to share the most interesting findings here with you.
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SOFTWARE SELECTIONS AND GO-LIVES

Los Angeles County selects SAS to provide analytics services and applications
Industry tags: BI/business analytics
“Los Angeles County will use SAS predictive analytics and data mining solutions as well as SAS BI solutions to fight organized fraud within the Department of Public and Social Services. Uncovering more than 200 probable fraud cases = BI and business analytics at their best.”—Jorge García, TEC BI Analyst

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The first of week of May marked a flurry of news by up-and-coming cloud enterprise applications vendors. During salesforce.com’s Cloudforce event in Chicago, Kenandy, Inc. announced release 2.0 of Kenandy Social ERP, the first cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system built entirely on Force.com, salesforce.com’s social enterprise cloud computing platform. The new release adds financials and order management to Kenandy’s manufacturing management core, specifically for product companies. Read the rest of this entry »