Firepond rides Salesforce.com's coattails with SaaS framework
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 8/1/2006 6:00:00 AM
Firepond is no newcomer to the sales quotation and product configuration market—it's been at it for about 20 years—but its latest push owes much to a relative new kid on the block in the software market. Firepond is among the growing list of vendors building solutions under Salesforce.com's development framework.
Salesforce.com offers customer relationship management (CRM) software under a hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Besides its own CRM suite, it has an on-demand development platform and solution directory for partner and customer applications called AppExchange. Firepond is among the 140 partners that built solutions on AppExchange.
According to Carol Ferrari, a Firepond VP, AppExchange's tools allowed the vendor to develop a true "multi-tenant" SaaS architecture for its Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) solution. Under this type of architecture, the software code served up to user companies is identical, with customizations contained as data configurations. From a look-and-feel perspective, Firepond CPQ appears to users as part of the Salesforce.com solution, she adds.
Says Ryan Borders, sales operations manager at PlantCML, a Temecula, Calif.-based call-center systems manufacturer that uses CPQ as part of its Saleforce.com solution, "Our users see seamless integration [between Saleforce.com and CPQ]."
Liz Herbert of Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research says some enterprise software vendors, such as SAP with its NetWeaver framework, have an ecosystem of partner solutions, but Salesforce.com is the first vendor with an SaaS model to do so. What's more, she says, AppExchange is easy for partners to use. "Partners say they build on the infrastructure very easily with point-and-click tools," says Herbert, adding that AppExchange's multi-tenant architecture keeps software code common by handling customizations as configurations at the meta-data layer.
Just getting a solution on AppExchange, however, doesn't mean its success is guaranteed, notes Herbert, as other competitors such as Selectica have AppExchange solutions. A check of AppExchange's directory also lists Comergent and BigMachines as quoting and configuration partners. At the end of the day, Herbert concludes, AppExchange partners must compete on factors such as strong customer references with a track record in particular verticals.
Ferrari agrees that partners on AppExchange still need to differentiate themselves. For Firepond, she says, a key advantage is the flexibility of the configuration engine.
"I like the fact that I can manage the rules and relationships that drive the configurations myself, rather than having to go back to Firepond to work out any changes," says PlantCML's Borders. "I'm more responsive to customers, and the product-line management team."
