NetSuite was seemingly on a roll at the end of January 2013. A day after its win at the Zicam maker, NetSuite announced that CallidusCloud, a leading provider of cloud-based sales performance management (SPM), training, hiring, and marketing software solutions, has transformed its global business and information technology (IT) efficiency by implementing NetSuite OneWorld. The newly deployed cloud enterprise suite has reportedly improved end-to-end cross-enterprise business visibility and performance for the fast-growing software company to replace an “IT nightmare” of 14 disparate business applications, including enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM). Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

About two years ago, my colleague P.J. Jakovljevic wrote a blog post about SYSPRO, which started with the description of a very interesting strategy that the enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor used to target its customers: PragmaVision. By introducing this concept, SYSPRO was showing that their product addresses the needs of decision makers that are both visionary (ready to embrace new technology) and pragmatic (not willing to test new products and waiting for them to prove their strengths). 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 »