Webcom, Inc Blog

ooking for ways to cuts costs in 2009? You might be interested in this recent article I found on ITworld.

The article cites a recent survey by Gartner that shows that many businesses plan to use software-as-a-service (SaaS) instead of on-premise solutions to help them solve business challenges more cost-effectively.

Some highlights from the survey:

• Nine out of ten companies plan to grow their use of SaaS in the next year
• More than one third of respondents (37%) plan to replace on-premises software with SaaS to drive down total cost of ownership (TCO)
• Those surveyed cited cost-effectiveness and ease of deployment as primary reasons for SaaS adoption

If you’d like to see how SaaS tools can help your company to innovate, cut expenses and compete in 2009 and beyond, consider Webcom’s WebSource CPQ simple-yet-powerful Web-based quote software, product configurator, and proposal generator solutions.

Contact us to explore whether our tools make sense for your business, and to set up a complimentary trial of any of our solutions. I look forward to hearing from you.

While I’m sure we’ll see a variety of posts on Webcom Inc’s blog, my entries will likely always be in my area of expertise:  effective and efficient use of the tool.  So whether you go to CPQ’s User Group for tips and helpful information or Webcom’s Client Summit to interact with other clients and voice your ideas, I’m hoping my entries will also help you use the tool productively on a day to day basis.

For my first entry I’ll describe something that I cannot work every day without, multiple monitors.  Walking around Webcom’s office in Milwaukee, you’ll find that everyone is working with more than one monitor.  The reason?  As most are realizing, having dual screen boosts productivity.  While everyone in our office can attest to being more productive, it provides even more of an advantage when working in CPQ.

We have found that the most optimal setup is to have three monitors:

1. Display workbook (xls file)
2. Display administration section of CPQ
3. Display user side where you can see the result of admin changes

While not all of us are sporting a trifecta of monitors, having even two monitors makes all the difference.  In this case, we show the administration on one screen and the user side on the other.

One thing to keep in mind, though, when working with multiple monitors (and thus multiple browser windows) is sessions.  CPQ relies on sessions to keep track of some things while working in the system.  Sessions can get mixed up when working with multiple browser windows.

In Internet Explorer v6 and v7, the session is shared among browser windows that share the same process (instance on the processes list in your task manager). The same process is shared when you create a new browser window using Ctrl+N, File>>New Window, or Right Click and choose Open In New Window.

To ensure that IE does not share the same session between browser windows, open a new instance of IE by opening the shortcut or the .exe from the desktop, quick launch, or start menu. Doing this ensures that a new session is created.

All FireFox browsers share the same session. There is no way to get around this. The best approach that I have found is to use IE and FireFox together to ensure that sessions are not shared at all.

So dust off that old CRT in storage or find some extra money in the budget for a second monitor.  Either way, you won’t be disappointed with the results.

In this day and age buying any enterprise software package should be all about “show me” not “tell me”. With SaaS offerings being available in virtually any functional area I simply don’t see why anyone should ever fall in a trap of spending hundreds of thousands or millions or tens of millions and in some cases hundreds of millions of dollars on software package simply because a slick sales team presented a bunch of power-point-ware and a pile of case studies.

This is particularly the case in the area of CRM. Whether we are talking about salesforce automation, marketing automation or service and support, the SaaS market is so mature that any company should make it mandatory that they try all of the key features, such as account, contact and opportunity management, forecasting, proposal and quotation generation, case management, email campaigns, etc. before making a purchasing decision.

When it comes to a free trial salesforce.com offers it in the CRM space, Webcom, Inc. offers it in the CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) space, Cast Iron offers it for its integration utility and even some SaaS implementers like Astedia will implement a small proof of concept free of charge to make sure that a selection of SaaS offerings will meet customer needs.

So whether your products are complex and you need a sales configurator or a product configurator, or your pricing is complex and you need a powerful pricing and quotation software or powerful online catalog, or eBay is putting a lot of pressure on you to make sure your customers are satisfied by enabling them to quickly and efficiently manage product returns, don’t settle for power-point-ware from entrenched vendors, go online, Google it, find the software that you need, evaluate it via free trial and when absolutely happy with it, purchase it.