The first part of this series (please see Quote-to-order: New Ingredients in the Recipe for Success) provided a detailed background of the still-evolving quote-to-order (Q2O) space, including historical examples to show why the market is increasingly demand driven. Part one summed up by making general observations as to how Q2O software solution vendors have addressed the market, and about the additional features and functionalities they will need to incorporate as demand shifts.
Now it's time to take a look at one of those high-flying "newcomer" providers: enter BigMachines, Inc. (www.bigmachines.com), a rapidly growing company founded in 1999, and with North American headquarters (HQ) in Chicago, Illinois (US), and European HQ in Frankfurt, Germany. The vendor also offers global customer support and hosting operations with a technology center in San Mateo, California (US), a West Coast data center in San Francisco, California (US), an East Coast data center in Sterling, Virginia (US), and an Asian research and development (R&D) center in Hyderabad, India.
According to the BigMachines Web site and associated press releases, the vendor is a provider of on-demand configurator, quoting, and proposal software and associated professional services. Its clients are in the high tech, industrial equipment, medical instruments, and software and services industries. The company's solutions help its clients' sales teams and channels to streamline their selling processes from customer inquiry-to-order. The BigMachines solution digitizes complex selling processes and captures an organization's tribal knowledge. By doing so, it provides online product selection, configurator, quoting, and ordering capabilities for new products and aftermarket parts, and streamlines configuration, pricing, quoting, proposal generation, and order management. BigMachines' rapidly growing customer base of over 100 corporations includes global leaders such as Kodak GCG, Siemens, Ingersoll Rand, and NTT Communications, as well as innovative growth companies such as ShoreTel and Aruba Networks.
Getting Cozy with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Powers
BigMachines' Lean Front-end (LFE) solution provides reporting capabilities that help analyze sales activities, and integrates to existing enterprise resource planning (ERP), computer-aided drawing (CAD), and CRM systems, including those from Salesforce.com, Oracle CRM OnDemand, Oracle, and SAP.
For Salesforce.com and Oracle CRM OnDemand customers, BigMachines offers two different product editions: SPP (standing for selection, pricing, proposal) and CPP (standing for configuration, pricing, proposal). The SPP is an entry-level solution that does not include the configurator module. Both solutions enable users to streamline their entire Q2O processes, all within the familiar Salesforce.com CRM interface.
The CPP and SPP product pricing capability includes BigMachines' certified and packaged integration to these two CRM products above. The vendor also offers Professional and Enterprise editions which have different price points, minimum numbers of users, bundles of other BigMachines modules, and other add-on original equipment manufacturer (OEM) software. All of these product editions are part of the umbrella BigMachines solution.
For instance, as noted in a BNET article from 2006, BigMachines'
SPP solution extends Salesforce.com's functionality to enable users to generate rich and accurate proposals. SPP users can quickly select the right products to quote to the customer by searching for products using multiple search criteria, including descriptions, part or stock-keeping unit (SKU) numbers, product families, price lists, and other custom fields. Users can add the selected product(s) to a quote with one click, and the quote is automatically populated with address and customer data from the related Salesforce Accounts and Contacts tabs. Quote and revision numbers are also generated automatically and all changes are tracked.
The article goes on to say that
[r]ich proposal packages can be generated in Adobe (.pdf) or Microsoft Word (.rtf) formats, and include cover letters, product descriptions for each line item, pictures, graphs, drawings, marketing collateral, and terms and conditions. All relevant proposal data is automatically populated back to the Salesforce Opportunity… [ensuring] up-to-date pipeline data and [eliminating] manual data re-entry. Quotes can be converted to orders with one click and submitted electronically to the business system via BigMachines Integration.
According to Big Machines, more than half of its customers are "the result of a 2005 certification agreement forged between the two companies," and SPP and CPP have since been available through the Salesforce.com AppExchange marketplace of on-demand applications.
Mid-2007, BigMachines announced the general availability of BigMachines CPP for Salesforce PRM (standing for partner relationship management), a best-of-breed application designed to help companies manage quotes and generate accurate forecasts across multiple sales channels. BigMachines' CPP application is now fully integrated with Salesforce.com's on-demand PRM solution. BigMachines CPP for PRM extends Salesforce PRM by empowering channel partners to more quickly and accurately configure solutions, generate their own quotations, and sell products more easily and quickly, while capturing channel quoting activity with direct integration to the Opportunities, Reports, and Forecasts tabs in Salesforce.com.
BigMachines CPP for PRM also integrates a slew of new features to improve the sales process for channel partners.
In 2006, BigMachines announced in a press release that the integration between its on-demand LFE solution and Oracle's Siebel CRM On Demand was "successfully validated" by Oracle. At the same time, BigMachines also became a Certified Partner in the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN). As mentioned above, BigMachines' offerings help enable sales teams "to configure complex products, manage complex pricing and up-sell options, create quotes and proposals, and send error-free orders to ERP systems or order entry personnel." As for Oracle, "its multi-channel offerings allow organizations to manage and coordinate all customer interactions across the Web, contact center, field sales/service force, branch/retail network, and indirect and partner distribution channels."
The same press release adds that
[t]he integration of BigMachines with Siebel [Oracle] CRM On Demand allows users to populate quotes and orders directly with Siebel [Oracle] CRM customer contact data, and then link detailed quote and order information directly to CRM opportunities. This helps reduce manual data entry across multiple systems, and provides an integrated view of sales wins and losses across customers, accounts, and opportunities.
[BigMachines' solution] can be configured to customer needs using on-demand or on-premise platforms, and can integrate with Siebel [Oracle]CRM On Demand or on-premise as needed.
Feeling Good Big Time
Godard Abel, BigMachines' co-founder and CEO, states in an interview published March 17, 2008 that he "started BigMachines in 1999 to help industrial equipment companies leverage the latest Web technology to sell complex products." He continues:
My family had been running an industrial pump business for 50 years and saw many of the challenges of selling these complex pumps. I left my position with a Silicon Valley software company to capture a huge opportunity to sell Web technology to companies like my father's. The goal was and continues to be to build an enduring company that combines Web technology with deep industry and process improvement expertise.
Recently, BigMachines announced it achieved a record in 2007 with a 96 percent growth in revenues and a 66 percent jump in customers over 2006. In addition, the company launched several major product releases, adding new capabilities to its best-of-breed solution suite. This came at the heels of formerly record-year 2006 with a 59 percent growth in contract bookings and a 79 percent jump in customers over 2005. Customers added in 2006 included divisions of global leaders NTT, Emerson, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Teradyne, and Kubota Tractor.
This growth trend continued in Q2 2008, as the company recently announced. So far in 2008, BigMachines has already won 18 new customers across a number of industries, including high technology, software, industrial equipment, and telecommunications. In Q2 the company achieved a record number of new contract bookings, which were up 84 percent year-over-year, as well as a 94 percent increase in recurring revenues compared to the same quarter in 2007. In addition, BigMachines achieved several significant milestones during Q2, including release of version 8.2 of its flagship software product; launch of its industry-leading customer support program, including its My BigIdea online innovation community; and successful completion of the Statement on Auditing Standards 70 (SAS 70) Type II audit, which assesses the operational effectiveness of internal controls within service organizations.
BigMachines has successfully deployed its solutions to customers that serve a broad variety of markets (listed previously), surpassing the 100 customers milestone. Some of the approximately 40 customers added in 2007 include divisions of global leaders United Technologies and Kodak, in addition to fast-growing software and technology companies such as Merge Healthcare, Enterasys, Bottomline Technologies, and NaviSite. The profitable, privately held vendor is also reinvesting for growth, as it approaches 50,000 licensed users across customers and their channel partners.
In 2008, BigMachines' staff grew to over 100 resources globally, while the vendor continued to expand its product development capacity with additional offshore development resources. It also added (about doubled) significant customer service resources, telecommunications infrastructure, and helpdesk systems across multiple office locations to support its growing global customer base. In addition, BigMachines expanded its partnerships with other technology and service providers to include ATG, Xactly Corporation, and Right90.
Recently, the company acquired its first joint customers through Right90 and Xactly. For Right90, data coming from BigMachines quotes and orders is integrated to Right90's forecasting solution at both the quote and product-line item level. With Xactly, the same BigMachines quote and order data is used to run compensation scenarios for sales incentive planning and reporting. It is still too early to share too many details about the ATG partnership, other than to say that the joint interest is in offering BigMachines configurator integrated with ATG's leading B2C and retail e-commerce capabilities.
Of note is that BigMachines has more joint customers with SAP than with any other ERP vendor. While its product is not SAP NetWeaver–certified (see Multipurpose SAP NetWeaver), the vendor uses other middleware to integrate where necessary and has seen no technical barriers to this point. In fact, customers have simply not demanded the certification, even those who use multiple SAP products. BigMachines thus claims to have not seen enough customer demand to warrant the certification investment—at least not yet.
Now it's time to take a look at one of those high-flying "newcomer" providers: enter BigMachines, Inc. (www.bigmachines.com), a rapidly growing company founded in 1999, and with North American headquarters (HQ) in Chicago, Illinois (US), and European HQ in Frankfurt, Germany. The vendor also offers global customer support and hosting operations with a technology center in San Mateo, California (US), a West Coast data center in San Francisco, California (US), an East Coast data center in Sterling, Virginia (US), and an Asian research and development (R&D) center in Hyderabad, India.
According to the BigMachines Web site and associated press releases, the vendor is a provider of on-demand configurator, quoting, and proposal software and associated professional services. Its clients are in the high tech, industrial equipment, medical instruments, and software and services industries. The company's solutions help its clients' sales teams and channels to streamline their selling processes from customer inquiry-to-order. The BigMachines solution digitizes complex selling processes and captures an organization's tribal knowledge. By doing so, it provides online product selection, configurator, quoting, and ordering capabilities for new products and aftermarket parts, and streamlines configuration, pricing, quoting, proposal generation, and order management. BigMachines' rapidly growing customer base of over 100 corporations includes global leaders such as Kodak GCG, Siemens, Ingersoll Rand, and NTT Communications, as well as innovative growth companies such as ShoreTel and Aruba Networks.
Getting Cozy with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Powers
BigMachines' Lean Front-end (LFE) solution provides reporting capabilities that help analyze sales activities, and integrates to existing enterprise resource planning (ERP), computer-aided drawing (CAD), and CRM systems, including those from Salesforce.com, Oracle CRM OnDemand, Oracle, and SAP.
For Salesforce.com and Oracle CRM OnDemand customers, BigMachines offers two different product editions: SPP (standing for selection, pricing, proposal) and CPP (standing for configuration, pricing, proposal). The SPP is an entry-level solution that does not include the configurator module. Both solutions enable users to streamline their entire Q2O processes, all within the familiar Salesforce.com CRM interface.
The CPP and SPP product pricing capability includes BigMachines' certified and packaged integration to these two CRM products above. The vendor also offers Professional and Enterprise editions which have different price points, minimum numbers of users, bundles of other BigMachines modules, and other add-on original equipment manufacturer (OEM) software. All of these product editions are part of the umbrella BigMachines solution.
For instance, as noted in a BNET article from 2006, BigMachines'
SPP solution extends Salesforce.com's functionality to enable users to generate rich and accurate proposals. SPP users can quickly select the right products to quote to the customer by searching for products using multiple search criteria, including descriptions, part or stock-keeping unit (SKU) numbers, product families, price lists, and other custom fields. Users can add the selected product(s) to a quote with one click, and the quote is automatically populated with address and customer data from the related Salesforce Accounts and Contacts tabs. Quote and revision numbers are also generated automatically and all changes are tracked.
The article goes on to say that
[r]ich proposal packages can be generated in Adobe (.pdf) or Microsoft Word (.rtf) formats, and include cover letters, product descriptions for each line item, pictures, graphs, drawings, marketing collateral, and terms and conditions. All relevant proposal data is automatically populated back to the Salesforce Opportunity… [ensuring] up-to-date pipeline data and [eliminating] manual data re-entry. Quotes can be converted to orders with one click and submitted electronically to the business system via BigMachines Integration.
According to Big Machines, more than half of its customers are "the result of a 2005 certification agreement forged between the two companies," and SPP and CPP have since been available through the Salesforce.com AppExchange marketplace of on-demand applications.
Mid-2007, BigMachines announced the general availability of BigMachines CPP for Salesforce PRM (standing for partner relationship management), a best-of-breed application designed to help companies manage quotes and generate accurate forecasts across multiple sales channels. BigMachines' CPP application is now fully integrated with Salesforce.com's on-demand PRM solution. BigMachines CPP for PRM extends Salesforce PRM by empowering channel partners to more quickly and accurately configure solutions, generate their own quotations, and sell products more easily and quickly, while capturing channel quoting activity with direct integration to the Opportunities, Reports, and Forecasts tabs in Salesforce.com.
BigMachines CPP for PRM also integrates a slew of new features to improve the sales process for channel partners.
In 2006, BigMachines announced in a press release that the integration between its on-demand LFE solution and Oracle's Siebel CRM On Demand was "successfully validated" by Oracle. At the same time, BigMachines also became a Certified Partner in the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN). As mentioned above, BigMachines' offerings help enable sales teams "to configure complex products, manage complex pricing and up-sell options, create quotes and proposals, and send error-free orders to ERP systems or order entry personnel." As for Oracle, "its multi-channel offerings allow organizations to manage and coordinate all customer interactions across the Web, contact center, field sales/service force, branch/retail network, and indirect and partner distribution channels."
The same press release adds that
[t]he integration of BigMachines with Siebel [Oracle] CRM On Demand allows users to populate quotes and orders directly with Siebel [Oracle] CRM customer contact data, and then link detailed quote and order information directly to CRM opportunities. This helps reduce manual data entry across multiple systems, and provides an integrated view of sales wins and losses across customers, accounts, and opportunities.
[BigMachines' solution] can be configured to customer needs using on-demand or on-premise platforms, and can integrate with Siebel [Oracle]CRM On Demand or on-premise as needed.
Feeling Good Big Time
Godard Abel, BigMachines' co-founder and CEO, states in an interview published March 17, 2008 that he "started BigMachines in 1999 to help industrial equipment companies leverage the latest Web technology to sell complex products." He continues:
My family had been running an industrial pump business for 50 years and saw many of the challenges of selling these complex pumps. I left my position with a Silicon Valley software company to capture a huge opportunity to sell Web technology to companies like my father's. The goal was and continues to be to build an enduring company that combines Web technology with deep industry and process improvement expertise.
Recently, BigMachines announced it achieved a record in 2007 with a 96 percent growth in revenues and a 66 percent jump in customers over 2006. In addition, the company launched several major product releases, adding new capabilities to its best-of-breed solution suite. This came at the heels of formerly record-year 2006 with a 59 percent growth in contract bookings and a 79 percent jump in customers over 2005. Customers added in 2006 included divisions of global leaders NTT, Emerson, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Teradyne, and Kubota Tractor.
This growth trend continued in Q2 2008, as the company recently announced. So far in 2008, BigMachines has already won 18 new customers across a number of industries, including high technology, software, industrial equipment, and telecommunications. In Q2 the company achieved a record number of new contract bookings, which were up 84 percent year-over-year, as well as a 94 percent increase in recurring revenues compared to the same quarter in 2007. In addition, BigMachines achieved several significant milestones during Q2, including release of version 8.2 of its flagship software product; launch of its industry-leading customer support program, including its My BigIdea online innovation community; and successful completion of the Statement on Auditing Standards 70 (SAS 70) Type II audit, which assesses the operational effectiveness of internal controls within service organizations.
BigMachines has successfully deployed its solutions to customers that serve a broad variety of markets (listed previously), surpassing the 100 customers milestone. Some of the approximately 40 customers added in 2007 include divisions of global leaders United Technologies and Kodak, in addition to fast-growing software and technology companies such as Merge Healthcare, Enterasys, Bottomline Technologies, and NaviSite. The profitable, privately held vendor is also reinvesting for growth, as it approaches 50,000 licensed users across customers and their channel partners.
In 2008, BigMachines' staff grew to over 100 resources globally, while the vendor continued to expand its product development capacity with additional offshore development resources. It also added (about doubled) significant customer service resources, telecommunications infrastructure, and helpdesk systems across multiple office locations to support its growing global customer base. In addition, BigMachines expanded its partnerships with other technology and service providers to include ATG, Xactly Corporation, and Right90.
Recently, the company acquired its first joint customers through Right90 and Xactly. For Right90, data coming from BigMachines quotes and orders is integrated to Right90's forecasting solution at both the quote and product-line item level. With Xactly, the same BigMachines quote and order data is used to run compensation scenarios for sales incentive planning and reporting. It is still too early to share too many details about the ATG partnership, other than to say that the joint interest is in offering BigMachines configurator integrated with ATG's leading B2C and retail e-commerce capabilities.
Of note is that BigMachines has more joint customers with SAP than with any other ERP vendor. While its product is not SAP NetWeaver–certified (see Multipurpose SAP NetWeaver), the vendor uses other middleware to integrate where necessary and has seen no technical barriers to this point. In fact, customers have simply not demanded the certification, even those who use multiple SAP products. BigMachines thus claims to have not seen enough customer demand to warrant the certification investment—at least not yet.
0 comments:
Post a Comment