Adding to its portfolio of CRM solutions, Oracle Corporation (NYSE: ORCL) has entered into an agreement to acquire privately held BigMachines, a cloud-based Configure, Price and Quote (CPQ) company. The terms of the deal were not revealed but according to the Business Insider Oracle paid a valuation of about five-times the company's revenue.
A product configurator guides sales people through a product’s available features, options, and dimensions, to ensure that only valid combinations are considered. It then generates a price quote based on that exact configuration with other pricing and product criteria. Complex quotes are usually subject to management approval and Big Machines includes a workflow manager to help expidite this process. Although not necessary to do their job, CPQ software acts as quality control process on sales reps since manual processes often create errors, add costs, delay revenue, and can even degrade the customer experience. BigMachines has two flavors of product.
The BigMachines Sales Platform which consists of the following modules:
- BigMachines Sales Engine for internal sales teams,
- BigMachines Channel Sales Engine for channel partners, VARs and distributors,
- BigMachines Document Engine for both to use to produce the documents used as part of the sales process,
- BigMachines eCommerce Engine A self-service, guided selling and configurator for online customers,
- BigMachines Unplugged for outside sales reps and partners when they are offline,
- BigMachines Admin Platform for administrator to set-up, maintain and personalize the BigMachines selling platform.
The BigMachines Sales Platform can be integrated into existing production CRM, ERP, CAD and other applications.
Flavor two of the company's offering is BigMachines Express - a similar product built on Salesforce.com’s platform. Express is a 100% native to Force.com and has three modules Configuration, Pricing and Quoting. About half of BigMachines customers are on Express.
As part of the acquisition Oracle annouced that the CPQ Cloud will be integrated with the Oracle Marketing, Sales, Social, Commerce and Service Clouds.
“Together with Oracle, we expect to provide a complete cloud solution to manage sales processes,” said David Bonnette, BigMachines’ CEO.
The Oracle Siebel product line already includes a product configurator which Siebel Systems added to its offering in 2000 when it acquired sales configuration vendor OnLink in a stock deal valued at $609 million at the time of the announcement. Although Oracle has not announced it yet, the Siebel Observer predicts, depending on the demand, the CPQ Cloud will be added to the Oracle Siebel Roadmap sooner as opposed to later giving existing customers another way to innovate around the edges of their current applications.
