Product Configurators

            

                In a perfect world, there is a forum for everything. With the internet, I suppose the world is moving closer to this opinioned perfection. You can find a forum for everything online, from handbags to power tools. And, of course, anything and everything Star Wars is always in demand. If only these forums could be taken from the virtual world, where you could talk to everyone in person and see how they work…

                Wait! That does exist at BigMachines. Our Customer Success Forums provide the chance to talk about your BigMachines product with other BigMachines users and experts from the company. Having trouble with figuring out how to phrase a certain aspect of your selling process? Maybe Joe Gibroni from Phrasing Experts Inc. will have a solution for you (note: Unfortunately, Joe Gibroni will not be able to attend this year).

The great part about being able to interact with everyone face-to-face is the ability to network. Unlike an online forum where you have to do some serious LinkedIn investigating to find out who anyone is, you get the whole package right in front of you.

In addition to the benefits of everything being physical, there is also the chance to participate in BigMachines product roadmap brainstorming. This is our way of letting you give us as much input as you want regarding our product development. Any and all suggestions are more than welcome.

Save your spot for a 90 minute consultation with a BigMachines expert. Experience a mini Breakthrough Opportunity Analysis (BOA)^SM to evaluate your company’s sales configuration processes. The BOA is an onsite workshop conducted by BigMachines experts that helps a company evaluate the need for business changes and identify opportunities to improve and streamline its sales processes. We understand that with time, many factors within a company changes and we want to ensure that your company is utilizing our solution to its fullest potential.

The BigMachines Customer Success Forum is coming to your house this May, that is if you live in Denver or the Bay Area. Check out these dates and places to see if there is a Customer Success Forum by you:

Denver Area – May 3^rd, 2012
Hosted by Spectra Logic

Bay Area – May 10^th, 2012
Hosted by Brocade

 If you don’t live in these areas, no problem! More forums are being scheduled as we speak.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that much has changed since my grandfather’s sales days. Back then, he would travel to customers and prospects with a heavy bag of products so he could demonstrate how the product worked and interacted with its various components. Over the years, sales professionals started to move away from this approach – in part due to the back breaking pain it caused. Instead, some started to carry paper catalogs. While not as heavy to carry, these were (and still are) pricey and much more difficult to use for new and existing customers in terms of visualizing how the product actually worked.

Today, sales professionals have a new sales bag – the iPad. With the third generation iPad in the hands of more than three million people, it is having a huge impact on the way we do business – and the sales department is leading their companies through this transformation toward mobility by using the iPad and other tablets as a sales tool while out in the field. Sales professionals are using the iPad while in front of their customers to have a conversation about their products’ features and options, providing an opportunity for product configuration on the spot.

In fact, here at BigMachines, we recently conducted our Second Annual Benchmark Survey, which takes a look at the state of the sales industry today. The findings show that sales mobility is continuously growing with 66.7% of respondents currently using a tablet or mobile device for selling while on the road.  More so, the survey results indicate that face-to-face contact still provides the greatest success with prospects and customers. Taking both those points into consideration, this next statistic shouldn’t be too shocking: a total of 62.5% said their mobile device is important for completing complex sales.

Here are just a few instances as to why the iPad is enhancing the face-to-face interaction between the sales rep and customers and prospects:

• It provides easy access to critical data on-the-go. The more information a sales rep has about a particular customer or prospect going into a meeting, the greater the chance ofclosing a deal.

• It enables quick and professional price quotes on the spot. With the proper applications, an entire proposal can be generated in front of the customer and terms quickly negotiated.

• It adds an extra degree of transparency to the deal, which customers appreciate. As quotes and proposals are generated in plain sight, they have full visibility into what is being negotiated throughout the process.

• While closing deals faster is an obvious plus for sales reps, it is also advantageous to the client. The faster a customer is delivered the product or service it needs, the better off it will be.

• The iPad can minimize, or even eliminate, the confusion that often accompanies complex orders. It is equipped with adequate software applications for pricing and quoting in real-time, enabling sales rep to walk a customer through an entire order in-person, all while allowing the rep to easily explain and iterate through all of the options available right in front of the customer.

It’s pretty incredible how this new, lightweight sales bag is revolutionizing the way the sales professionals do their jobs better while on the road – ultimately leading to increased productivity and an improved bottom line.

So, tell me, is your organization rolling out the iPad to the sales force? What does your sales bag look like?

 

Tim Handorf

VP of Product Management

This is a re-post from www.bigmachines.com:

BigMachines announced that its BigMachines 11 release has achieved Oracle Database Ready status through Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), demonstrating that BigMachines has fully tested and supports its product on the Oracle Database 11g Release 2. BigMachines is a Gold level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork.

Oracle Database Ready is part of the Oracle Exastack Ready program, which allows partners such as BigMachines to be recognized by Oracle for developing, testing and tuning their applications on the latest component products of Oracle Exadata Database Machine or Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud engineered systems. Oracle Database 11g offers BigMachines industry leading performance, reliability and scalability to power the most demanding business critical applications. It also helps customers save money by lowering storage usage, reducing administration tasks, and enabling consolidation onto secure private database cloud environments.

BigMachines software streamlines the sales process and provides solutions for product configuration, pricing, quoting, proposal generation and B2B ecommerce. BigMachines’ Oracle Database Ready status helps ensure that joint Oracle and BigMachines customers will leverage proven technology and quickly receive benefits of an integrated, joint solution including reduced time to implement, seamless user experience and rapid return on investment.


View the entire press release on our website.

For additional information on using BigMachines sales enablement software with Oracle, please visit http://www.bigmachines.com/oracle.php

BigMachines recently announced the release of BigMachines 12, the latest version of the company's award-winning SaaS selling solution. BigMachines software assists sales teams, channel partners and resellers in product configuration, pricing and quoting, proposal generation and B2B ecommerce.

Customers will benefit from enhancements and new features in BigMachines 12 including:

• The improved Migration Management Center allows customers to easily transfer changes between their BigMachines test and production sites. Customers can easily compare changes between two BigMachines instances, filter results, and select specific components to update. The new migration management center allows for greater visibility of changes and speeds up the migration process.

• BigMachines’ new Configuration Layout Editor allows customers to create complex configuration and search layouts with an easy to use drag-and-drop editor for pixel perfect control of the page layout. The results are web pages are easier to design, faster to load, and allow for richer functionality.

• BigMachines updated Commerce Rules Wizard now provides customers with a centralized location to create and edit all commerce rules.  The new functionality adds more flexibility in the BigMachines commerce process and improves the user experience by providing a more scalable, standardized way to create hiding attributes, constraints and validations within BigMachines.

Additional information can be found at www.bigmachines.com. Customers can view the BigMachines 12 release notes and learn more about scheduled upgrades by visiting support.bigmachines.com.

BigMachines' breakthrough innovation is on display in its brand new release, BigMachines 12, the latest version of the company’s flagship, award-winning SaaS platform. A sneak peek of the BETA version of the new release generated much interest and appreciation at BigIdeas, the annual BigMachines Customer and Cloud conference held October 23 – 25, 2011 in Chicago.

BigMachines 12 enriches the end user experience by allowing sales teams, channel partners and resellers to easily configure products, manage complex pricing, and generate quotes and proposals more efficiently and securely. The powerful online administration feature enhancements in BigMachines 12 will help admin users easily set up visually rich configuration pages, enhance the quoting experience for their end users and seamlessly migrate data from their staging and test environments to their production setups.

New features delivered in BigMachines 12 are the result of extensive industry research combined with customer input. BigMachines encourages active community participation in the form of:

• Customers ideas via the My BigIdea innovation web portal
• Interactions at Regional Customer Success Forums
• Votes on most-requested enhancements during BigIdeas in the United States and Europe
  

Current BigMachines customers will benefit from enhancements and new features in BigMachines 12 include the following:

• Intuitive drag and drop interface allows for high quality UX layouts of configuration pages.
• New AJAX commerce rules enable dynamic updates without the need to refresh pages, resulting in a rich end-user quoting experience
• One stop migration center administration provides enhanced ability to compare data between local and remote instances as well as seamlessly migrate data
• Enhanced step administration user interface simplifies management of workflow set ups

BigMachines BETA is scheduled to be available November 18th, 2011. Additional information can be found on the BigMachines Support Center.

You have questions. We have answers! Ask our team of B2B sales experts about your current challenges in the inquiry-to-order process and learn how you can sell more and sell faster with product configuration, workflow approvals, and proposal generation.

This is a repost of a press release issued by Vendavo on 10.24.11.

Vendavo® announced today that it will showcase its price management and optimization solution – the most assured way for B2B companies to become more profitable™ – as a gold sponsor at BigIdeas Chicago 2011.  BigIdeas, the annual BigMachines customer and cloud conference for B2B professionals, will be held on October 23-25, 2011 at the Swissôtel in Chicago, Illinois.

Vendavo is the leading provider of price management and optimization solutions for large enterprises worldwide. The company's solution drives bottom-line results by giving businesses true enterprise-wide control of their entire pricing process. Vendavo's enterprise-class software solution delivers big increases in profits—from 10-30 percent—by systematically driving incremental improvements in average prices throughout the pricing process.

During the BigIdeas 2011 Solution Showcase, Dan Bormolini, from Vendavo Business Pricing Consulting, will be presenting “The Art and Science of Optimizing Price in Configured Products: It’s All About the Metrics” on Monday, October 24 from 3:30-4:20 PM. This session will provide insight on how to improve price for any configured products company by using the right metrics.

“Price Management and Sales Configuration are perfectly complementary solutions,” said Ken Pulverman, Vice President of Marketing at Vendavo. “We are very pleased to highlight at BigIdeas 2011 the joint value our customers are achieving by deploying our solutions together.”

“BigIdeas Chicago is the largest gathering of BigMachines customers, partners and industry experts,” said Will Wiegler, Vice President of Marketing, BigMachines. “This annual event delivers inspiration, innovation and practical solutions to help companies grow their sales using industry-leading, cloud-based solutions from BigMachines and its partners. We are delighted to provide a showcase for Vendavo to present its solutions to our conference attendees.”

The BigIdeas conference offers sales and business professionals a chance to learn how to sell more and sell faster from cloud computing industry leaders. Attendees will collaborate on new methods to streamline their selling process, reduce costs and increase revenues using the BigMachines Selling Platform and complementary solutions. Whether a company sells direct, through reseller channels, or online to customers, BigIdeas attendees will discover the latest solutions and best practices to improve their business processes. Register now at www.bigmachines.com/bigideas.

PROS, a world leader in pricing and revenue management software, today announced its participation in the BigMachines BigIdeas 2011 Conference, scheduled for Oct. 23-25 at Chicago's Swissotel.

PROS Senior Director for Pricing Science Neil Biehn, Ph.D., will address the conference in a delivery titled "Prescriptive Pricing Through Segmentation." He will uncover how combining pricing optimization with configure-price-quote capabilities can drive even greater profitability for organizations. In his presentation, Biehn will also demonstrate how optimized pricing and quoting tools -- augmented by PROS scientific segmentation -- enhance sales teams' confidence as they negotiate B2B transactions.

As technology partners, PROS and BigMachines focus on integrating the power of PROS prescriptive pricing software with the BigMachines B2B configure, price and quote platform.

"We appreciate the opportunity to present at the BigMachines conference, which is always a stellar event with a high-caliber audience," said PROS Chief Marketing Officer Tim Girgenti. "Today we're seeing a crisis in confidence among sales teams, as they deal with volatility in both currency and raw materials, and a competitive global market place. With optimized prescriptive pricing, we're bringing confidence back to sales teams, enabling them to win, with the assurance that they've provided their customers with the right quotes and for the right products."

Learn more about BigIdeas at www.bigmachines.com/bigideas

Channelinsight, the leader of channel sales management solutions today announces a new partnership with BigMachines, the leader in product configuration, pricing and quoting, proposal generation and B2B ecommerce. Together these industry leaders have created a cloud-based solution that empowers enterprises to fully automate closed loop control into the discount management process, enabling customers to gain unprecedented visibility into channel sales data.

The partnership allows both companies to offer a channel sales management solution with unparalleled ability to maximize the return on discount pricing policies in the channel.  The solution leverages Channelinsight’s Lead to Ship™ functionality in tandem with BigMachines configuration, pricing and quoting capabilities to automatically close the loop from configuration to quote to shipment.  This results in better forecasting, reduced discounting and improved management of opportunities being fulfilled through the channel.

"We are consistently looking for ways to enhance the value we bring to our customers," said Mark Geene, CEO of Channelinsight. "Our partnership with BigMachines closes the loop on the discount management process with unprecedented control over special pricing and discounts. BigMachines cloud-based selling platform combined with Channelinsight Discount Manager allows enterprises to effectively manage the channel discount process."

Companies benefit from the new partnership by using the BigMachines cloud-based selling platform, integrated with Salesforce CRM, to help their sales teams and channel partners generate quotes, select and manage product configurations, automate renewal contracts, and enter orders.  Channelinsight Discount Manager reconciles POS data with quotes issued from BigMachines to automatically track sales results against special price quotes, reducing the time spent manually processing discount claims.  This provides complete visibility into their indirect sales channel. As a result of implementing this solution companies can expect to reduce their cost of processing discounts by 80 percent and ensure that partners are in compliance with their discount process.

"We look forward to working closely with Channelinsight to help enterprises across all industries sell more and sell faster," said Matt Gorniak, SVP Worldwide Sales and Alliances, BigMachines. "Our products and expertise are complementary, creating a win-win scenario for companies looking to better understand and serve their customers."

In addition, Channelinsight will be gold sponsor of BigIdeas Chicago 2011, the annual BigMachines customer and cloud conference for B2B professionals. Attendees can see Channelinsight’s offerings in action in the BigIdeas Sponsor Expo from October 23 – 25 at the Swissotel.

"We are excited to show BigIdeas attendees the synergies between BigMachines and Channelinsight, as we are both focused on streamlining and increasing the efficiency of the sales process," continued Mark Geene. "By pre-integrating our products we provide the most functional and cost-effective end-to-end discount management solution in the industry."

Learn more about BigIdeas at www.bigmachines.com/bigideas and more about Channelinsight at www.channelinsight.com

BigMachines is the global leader in product configuration, pricing and quoting, proposal generator and B2B ecommerce. With many new and existing users worldwide, we're pleased to offer two levels of administrator certification: Yellow Belt and Blue Belt.

Our software certification programs are available to all current BigMachines customers and consulting partners.

BigMachines interactive training classes are designed to teach administrators and users the fundamentals of setting up, customizing and maintaining their BigMachines software solution. Yellow Belt certification classes provide the building blocks for implementing and administering BigMachines, and are a prerequisite for more advanced classes that lead to Blue Belt certification.

Blue Belt Certification classes offer advanced content in focused areas of the BigMachines platform. Students who successfully complete all four Blue Belt classes, and pass the Certification Exams at the end of each of those classes, will obtain the Blue Belt Advanced Administrator Certification.

BigMachines customers and partners can choose to take certification classes in the way that best fit their schedules, learning styles and budgets. Classes are offered at BigMachines Learning Centers in Deerfield, Illinois; San Mateo, California; Frankfurt, Germany; and London, UK; can be delivered on-site at your location or can be taken via an online learning platform. The online option allows each customer to learn at his or her own pace, save on travel costs and still receive the same high level of administration training that an in-person class offers.

Learn more about upcoming training at www.bigmachines.com/training1.php

This is a re-post from our website.

BigMachines, Inc., the leader in product configuration, pricing and quoting, proposal generator and B2B ecommerce, today announced that its third annual Customer Innovation Awards will be presented at the BigIdeas Chicago 2011 conference. These awards recognize customers who have demonstrated business success and innovation using the BigMachines Selling Platform and those who have contributed the most popular enhancements to the BigMachines product roadmap. BigIdeas, the annual BigMachines customer and cloud conference, will be held October 23 to 25, 2011 at the Swissôtel Chicago.

Customer Innovation Awards will be presented for the following categories:

• Big Innovation Award is presented to the BigMachines customer that demonstrates the most innovative use of BigMachines within their company.
• Big Success Award is given to the company that demonstrates a significant return on investment (ROI) from using the BigMachines Selling Platform or demonstrates how BigMachines enabled them to eliminate costly tools and processes in their company.
• Biggest Idea Award recognizes the customer that contributes the most innovative idea to enhance the BigMachines' platform. Ideas are submitted online through the My BigIdea innovation portal on the BigMachines Customer Support Center.

For more information on the Customer Innovation Awards, or to submit a nomination, visit http://www.bigmachines.com/bigideas/big-awards.php

"The Customer Innovation Awards program recognizes excellence within our customer community," said Will Wiegler, Vice President of Marketing at BigMachines. "At BigMachines, we not only deliver innovative software to enable our customers to sell more and sell faster, but we also deliver customer success. At BigIdeas, we take the opportunity to highlight truly inspiring examples of innovation and accomplishment among our customers. The conference offers attendees to hear from many BigMachines customers in a variety of industries, to learn from their achievements, and leave with best practices that they can incorporate into their own business processes."

For more information and to read the full release, visit: http://www.bigmachines.com/third-annual-customer-innovation-awards.php

This is a re-post from our website.

BigMachines, Inc., the global leader in product configuration, pricing and quoting, proposal generator and B2B ecommerce, today announced the featured speakers for its BigIdeas Chicago 2011 customer and cloud conference, which will be held October 23 to 25, 2011 at the Swissôtel Chicago. BigIdeas has become one of the largest cloud innovation conferences where attendees share and learn best practices for increasing productivity and generating high value by streamlining their sales processes.

BigIdeas will feature the following keynote speakers:

• David Bonnette, President, BigMachines, discussing the pillars of customer success
• Kaihan Krippendorff, a blogger for Fast Company who has been featured in Business Week and Harvard Business Review, and is the author of three business strategy books, speaking on how to out-think the competition
• Justin Shriber, Region Vice President, Oracle SaaS Applications Group, sharing lessons for sales teams to deliver strong results, even when times are tough
• Peter Gaylord, Director of Product Marketing, Sales Cloud, salesforce.com, discussing how a Social Enterprise approach can improve your sales results -- and your bottom line
• Frederic Kerrest, President and Co-Founder, Okta, sharing best practices for companies who are expanding their use of cloud apps within their organizations

"Delivering unmatched customer success is the mission for BigMachines. Period. This principle will resonate throughout our BigIdeas conference," said David Bonnette. "Many of our conference sessions will spotlight our customers' innovation and success in three core areas: driving and accelerating adoption of our solutions; increasing productivity; and generating valuable results. BigIdeas is a great opportunity to learn, share and take away insights that you can use to make an immediate impact on your business growth."

The BigIdeas Chicago conference will feature interactive sessions focused on solutions for B2B eCommerce, channel sales, product configuration, and proposal and contract generation, among other topics. In addition, a variety of training and certification opportunities are available to customers and partners of all skill levels. Conference attendees are also invited to a gala celebration at the House of Blues Chicago.

Conference sponsors will showcase their services and solutions in the BigIdeas Sponsor Expo and during conference sessions.

• Platinum sponsors include Okta, Oracle and salesforce.com.
• Gold sponsors include Channelinsight, IBM, InsideView, PROS, Vendavo and Xactly.
• Silver sponsors include Accenture, Cloud9, DocuSign, EDL Consulting, Lumographics and Pierce Washington.

Additional information about BigIdeas for attendees, media, and sponsors can be found at www.bigmachines.com/bigideas.

This is a re-post from our website.

BigMachines, a Gold level member of Oracle® PartnerNetwork (OPN), today announced that BigMachines 11.1 software has achieved Oracle Validated Integration with Oracle CRM On Demand Release 19. BigMachines' on-demand selling platform enables customers to help increase sales and revenue. BigMachines provides innovative solutions for product configuration, pricing and quoting, proposal generation and B2B ecommerce. With this Oracle Validated Integration, key quoting activities from BigMachines can be accessed directly from Oracle CRM On Demand, providing customers with a seamless user experience, and ensuring accurate and convenient data flow between BigMachines and Oracle CRM On Demand.

To achieve Oracle Validated Integration, Oracle partners are required to meet a stringent set of requirements that are based on the needs and priorities of the customers. BigMachines integration with Oracle CRM On Demand Release 19 allows customers to extend the value of their CRM investment by providing a streamlined opportunity-to-quote-to-order process. Data stored in Oracle CRM On Demand can be accessed by BigMachines during the quoting process, helping ensure accurate product configurations and quotes. This data sharing also enhances CRM reporting and forecasting capabilities and eliminates redundant data re-entry into multiple systems.

"Our relationship with Oracle ensures that our customers experience seamless integration between Oracle CRM On Demand and BigMachines, enhancing user adoption and delivering more meaningful results," stated Tim Handorf, VP Product Management, BigMachines. "Many mutual customers have demonstrated measurable benefits from extending Oracle CRM On Demand with BigMachines, and the Oracle Validated Integration further demonstrates our product alignment."

Read the full press release on our website.

BigIdeas Chicago, BigMachines' Customer & Cloud Conference, is just a few weeks away and we are looking forward to seeing you there! At each BigIdeas conference we celebrate the BigMachines community and this year is no exception as we focus on the theme of Customer Success. BigMachines has grown to be the industry leader by recognizing that customer success equals our success. We live and breathe this philosophy at every level in the company. At BigIdeas, much of the focus will be on YOU: our customers, prospects and partners. We will examine best practices that enable our customers to become successful and how BigMachines, as well as our partners, can help accelerate that success. We continue to develop innovations and focus on best practices to help your business grow and be more productive, and we will showcase powerful solutions to help your organization sell more and sell faster.

At BigIdeas 2011, we will introduce BigMachines 12 – the newest release of our award-winning selling platform, designed to empower all your sales channels with innovative solutions that include guided selling, configuration, pricing, quoting, proposal and contract output, and much more.

Throughout the conference you can choose from a variety of customer panels to hear first-hand experiences from other companies that have improved their business processes and grown revenue. If you are more the hands-on type, you can attend training classes to learn all about the new capabilities of BigMachines 12. Participate in interactive product roadmap sessions and share your input and ideas with our Product Management team. For new customers and prospects, we'll discuss best practices for getting started with BigMachines and how to drive adoption across your organization. And we’ll engage in conversations with you throughout the event to learn how we can help your business succeed and generate more sales, faster and with more accuracy.

Interested in sharing your success at the event? Contact us to learn more about presentation and customer panel speaking opportunities.

2011 also marks BigMachines' third annual Customer Innovation Awards, presented to customers who show innovations in their use of the BigMachines Selling Platform, demonstrate measureable ROI, and have contributed to BigMachines product enhancements. Previous award recipients include Solar Turbines, SPX Process Equipment, Acme Packet, and Williams. Nominate your organization for the Big Innovation Award and Big Success Award. Our third award, the Biggest Idea Award, goes to the BigMachines customer who has submitted the most popular idea via the My BigIdea online community. Ideas submitted to My BigIdea help ensure that each new release of our BigMachines software includes the features that are most valuable to you.

And if all that isn't enough, we're throwing a party to celebrate our growing community at House of Blues Chicago! We hope to see you at BigIdeas in Chicago. It's October 23-25 and we still have a few seats left, so don't wait!

2011 marks BigMachines' third annual Customer Innovation Awards, presented at our Annual Customer and Cloud Computing Conference, BigIdeas. BigMachines customers who show significant innovation in the usage of their BigMachines Selling Platform, ROI, and contributions to BigMachines product enhancements can be nominated and win one of three awards: Big Innovation, Big Success, and Biggest Idea.

Previous winners include:

SPX Process Equipment, a leading manufacturer, who won for implementing an innovative use of BigMachines within their company. SPX used BigMachines to quickly adapt their sales processes to change across a wide range of products; from commodities through highly engineered equipment, and to streamline sales of these products through multiple sales channels.

Acme Packet, the leader in session border control solutions, who was recognized for its use of BigMachines in significantly reducing both its order error rate and the time to produce a sales quote. In addition BigMachines has increased accuracy of their price book, streamlined their approval processes and improved cross-functional communications.

Williams, a leading manufacturer of highly customizable engineered products for the HVAC industry, who won for their use of BigMachines to power the company's channel partner portal resulting in 400% sales growth within two years without increasing the numbers of sales managers, applications engineers or customer service personnel. Williams feels that they now have the most advance sales and ordering tools in the industry.

Want to join this innovative group? BigMachines customers may self-nominate or be nominated at www.bigmachines.com/bigideas/big-awards.php for two of three awards: Big Innovation Award and Big Success Award. Our third award, Biggest Idea, goes to the BigMachines My BigIdea community member that contributes the most innovative idea to enhance BigMachines' products; the honor is awarded base on the most number of votes received in 2011.

Oracle OpenWorld is all about exploring technology: how to get more out of what you have, how to prepare for what's coming next, and how to choose from and use an ever-growing collection of choices to develop just the system you need for your business. The new skills, new connections, and new ideas for extending the value of your company's IT investments more than justify the time and expense required for a week of unparalleled learning.

OpenWorld is a great chance to learn how the BigMachines selling platform can help you to streamline sales processes whether you sell direct, through channel resellers, or via eCommerce.  This is also an opportunity to speak to the BigMachines team about our solutions for Oracle users, view demos, meet some of our current customers, or discuss partnering opportunities.

Find BigMachines in the CRM On Demand Pavilion in Moscone West, booth 3837, October 2-6, where we'll demo our award-winning product configuration, pricing, quoting and proposal, and eCommerce solutions. As a member of the Oracle Inner Circle, BigMachines is part of a select group of best-of-breed partners that have demonstrated significant value driven by proven customer success, traction with Oracle's sales organization, and synergy with Oracle CRM On Demand's current and future direction. Learn more and register.

Unable to make the event? Join us for a live product demo on September 22!

BigMachines booth at Dreamforce was buzzing throughout the event with many new and experienced salesforce.com CRM users interested in learning more about product configuration, pricing, quoting, proposal and eCommerce software.

In addition to showing our BigMachines selling platform, we also shared demos of QuickConfig integrated with Salesforce Real Time Quotes and Conga Composer - which creates a complete quoting and proposal solution for small business in need of guided selling and configuration.

In addition to live product demos of our award-winning software, BigMachines could be found during general sessions with our customers from ArcSight (an HP Company), Brocade Communications and Acme Packet who shared how they use the BigMachines selling platform and the measurable benefits achieved after implementation.

If you had a chance to stop by and say hello - thank you! We hope you will join us later this year at our customer and cloud computing conference, BigIdeas. If you were not able to make it, join us on September 22 at 2 PM Central Time to learn how you can streamline the sales process from inquiry to order with product configuration, workflow approvals and proposal generation.

This is a repost from our website.

BigMachines, Inc. today announced BigMachines QuickConfig 2 is now available on salesforce.com’s AppExchange, the world’s most-popular marketplace for business apps. BigMachines QuickConfig 2 delivers intuitive guided selling and product configuration, enabling business users to quickly select the best products and services to add to sales quotes and opportunities. 

Built using Force.com, salesforce.com’s social enterprise platform for employee apps, QuickConfig2 is now available for test drive and deployment on the AppExchange at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/. The announcement was made today at Dreamforce 2011, the cloud computing event of the year.   A gold sponsor of Dreamforce, BigMachines will be in Booth #1007 in the Dreamforce Expo. Additional information can be found at http://www.bigmachines.com.

BigMachines QuickConfig 2 provides guided selling features to ensure that sales quotes include the optimal product mix as well as accurate pricing.  The latest release contains powerful enhancements, including expanded configuration options that support complex pricing calculations; enhanced support for complex search parameters; and the ability to associate specific configuration rules to a user’s Salesforce profile.

Comments on the News

•    “The QuickConfig application will have a huge, positive impact on our ability to market and sell all of our products,” said Bruce Martin, director of Financial Planning, Antenna International.  “Their new product integrates with Salesforce CRM and is easy to implement and understand, is cost effective, and is a seamless extension of Salesforce CRM functionality.”

•    “We continuously strive to deliver innovative guided selling and product configuration solutions for Salesforce CRM users,” said Tim Handorf, vice president, Product Management, BigMachines.  “We spent a year conducting extensive testing with our QuickConfig users, and the enhanced performance and usability of the latest release are the direct result of their feedback.”

•    “Customers coming to Dreamforce will have to chance to see some truly innovative approaches that partners like BigMachines have taken in leveraging the capabilities of the Force.com platform,” said Ron Huddleston, vice president, ISV Alliances, salesforce.com. “Apps like these continue to push the social, open, mobile and trusted capabilities customers expect from the salesforce.com ecosystem.”


Dreamforce 2011 is the cloud computing event of the year.  The ninth annual conference will welcome more than 30,000 customers, partners and developers to the new world of the social enterprise. With more than 450 sessions and 250 cloud companies in the expo, Dreamforce offers the content and educational opportunities that enable attendees to tap into the power of the social enterprise.

About the Force.com Platform and AppExchange
Force.com  is the trusted social enterprise platform for building and running any employee app in the cloud. Force.com powers the Salesforce CRM  apps, the more than 200,000 custom apps used by salesforce.com customers such as Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE, and Sprint Nextel and the more than 1,200 ISV apps built by partners such as BMC, FinancialForce.com and Fujitsu.
 
Enterprise apps built on the Force.com platform can be easily distributed and marketed through the salesforce.com AppExchange http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/.
 
The salesforce.com social enterprise platform delivers the most trusted and comprehensive cloud technologies for social, mobile and open apps.  It includes Force.com, the cloud platform for employee apps, Heroku, the cloud platform for customer apps and Database.com, the cloud database to integrate the social enterprise.

Salesforce, Dreamforce, Force.com, Heroku, AppExchange and others are trademarks of salesforce.com, inc.