Exalt Inks Pact With Salesforce.com

Exalt Solutions has inked an agreement to put its multivendor solution configuration tool on Software as a Service (SaaS) high flyer Saleforce.com's AppExchange.

Leslie Swanson, the president of Cambridge, Mass. based Exalt, which is partially owned by ChannelWeb parent Everything Channel, a United Business Media company, said the tight integration with Salesforce.com's CRM and PRM offerings will provide a big boost in sales productivity for companies using both products.

The tight integration should improve sales forcecasts given that sales managers will have a more complete picture of opportunities with information like revenue per quote and proposal and product mix per quote and proposal, she said.

"This allows any AppExchange user working with Salesforce.com to seamlessly go from an opportunity in Salesforce.com directly into Exalt to configure and quote a multivendor solution," she said. "It blends Salesforce.com's strong CRM capabilities with Exalt's very unique solution selling capabilities. Any Salesforce.com user can now dramatically increase their attach rate when building a solution by using Exalt."

"We have many joint customers," added Swanson. "This allows those companies to seamlessly integrate both solutions. Exalt combined with Salesforce is an ideal solution for managing both direct sales and channel sales organizations."

The Salesforce.com pact follows agreements with solution provider behemoth CDW and specialty distributor Westcon aimed at helping them speed up what has up until now been a time consusming and byzantine process for doing multivendor sales quotes. Many sales reps still use a mish mash of vendor configurators and then dump the output into an Excel spreadsheet.

Salesforce.com's AppExchange is aimed at providing instant access to hundreds of SAAS applications that can integrate seamlessly with Salesforce.com.