Business intelligence relies on clean data and a single version of the
truth. On-demand sales compensation management software vendor Xactly
believes that kind of valuable information can be extrapolated from sales
data.
The company has thus turned to new partners, including business intelligence
software vendor Cognos and enterprise data
integration specialist Informatica , to roll out a new
set of applications built on aggregated sales information.
Those new modules include Xactly Data Management, which customers can use to
integrate data from disparate sources and applications like enterprise
resource planning (ERP)
Xactly hosts an on-demand repository that uses technology from Informatica
to pull data generated by various on-premise applications, and uses
technology from Cognos to produce analytics and reports.
Xactly CEO Chris Cabrera said that customers had asked his company for more
ways of using the sales compensation data they were generating from the
vendor’s core application, Xactly Incent. In his view, that data gives the
truest picture of the business. For example, the way that commissions are
split between different sales reps can tell executives which incentives
drove the final sale.
“Post-sale data is the most accurate and important data, because it reflects
what actually happened in the field” he told internetnews.com.
The company is planning to roll out other sales compensation-related modules
such as territory planning, quote management and price management
applications in the coming months.
Jeff Kaplan, managing director of SaaS consulting firm THINKstrategies, said
Xactly is attempting to create sales-driven business intelligence. “BI tends
to look at almost all dimensions of the business activity and tries to
correlate them all. In many cases, driving that BI process through sales
activity might make it even more effective and easy to generate actionable
results from,” he told internetnews.com.
Kaplan also noted that Xactly’s approach demonstrates why SaaS is an
attractive business model. SaaS vendors can observe their customers’
behavior and release new versions more quickly and uniformly than their
on-premise rivals because they’re working off a single code base.
“SaaS makes it easier to react in an agile development process, and this is
allowing them to change how they’re viewing their own application.”
In other words, Xactly is getting BI from its business model and using it to
build a BI application.
