What makes Veloce CPQ technology better?
What is Veloce’s CPQ product? How can it do what the others cannot?
Let’s break it down.
At Veloce we have learned from our passionate — some would even say obsessive — focus on CPQ over the past 20 plus years to create a superior CPQ system.
Here are the seven core reasons our CPQ product is better:
- Superior performance and scalability
- Intelligent Solver Technology (IST)
- Easy to setup and maintain
- Flexible and portable product model
- Voice-driven CPQ
- Automated migration tools from Apttus, Siebel and others
- Easy extensibility
Superior performance and scalability
Veloce is fast: over 20 times faster than the market leading CPQ system
Remember that market leader we worked for? They were kind enough to invite us to do some performance benchmarking versus their CPQ product. They gave us their largest and most complex problem and asked us to recreate it in our system to see how fast we can solve it. Being an eager startup with no paying customers at the time, we jumped at the opportunity to show off our stuff. So over a weekend our team developed a migration tool that reads the data schema of that company’s product and instantly generates a product model in our system that performs the same CPQ logic in Veloce. We expected it to perform faster; we just didn’t know how much faster.
Turns out, our solution performs over 20 times faster than their solution. Not 20%, mind you, but TWENTY TIMES FASTER!
When we showed our solution to the company’s engineering team they couldn’t believe it. They thought we’d faked it. Hardcoded it in the browser. They asked us to show them the network traffic. The browser network traffic did not lie. Our configurator returned valid solutions in 200 milliseconds. Over and over again the result came back in real time with no perceptible delay. The user experience was nothing short of magical.
The engineers of our competitor told us their product took over 5 seconds to respond to the same exact problem. Now we never actually saw their solution working. I suspect it took longer than 5 seconds if it worked at all. But let’s take them at their word as a bare minimum performance gap and do the math: 5 seconds or 5000 ms / 200 ms = 25 times faster.
To illustrate this go to google.com and start to type any request. Notice how quickly it suggests realistic autocompletion of your request. Submit a request and see how quickly it returns a list of results. These are sub-second responses like the response time of Veloce CPQ.
Now bring up the stopwatch feature on your phone. Do the same steps as above but each time start your stopwatch and wait five seconds. How would you like this search service if it took 5 seconds to get a response? Exactly! You’d run for the nearest alternative.
Now back to your CPQ system. Why would you make your salespeople and customers wait 5 seconds for a response when they could get it faster than they can think? You’d only do this if you had no alternative. What we are telling you loud and clear is that you have an alternative in Veloce CPQ that is 25 times faster than what you are using today.
Perfect horizontal scalability on the modern cloud
What about scalability? Veloce runs as a stateless microservice. What does that mean? Stateless means the state is maintained with the client not the server. You’ve probably heard the term “serverless cloud.” This describes the modern cloud because there is no single server, no dedicated hardware to bog down. The cloud automatically allocates the resource required to handle each request. So Veloce scales “horizontally” — in other words: without performance degradation.
Intelligent Solver Technology
Let’s move on from speed and scalability and talk about what our CPQ solution can actually do that other CPQ systems cannot.
Coming back to the tech giant’s giant configuration problem: how are we able to solve it in one shot?
Veloce’s configurator has a special feature we call Intelligent Solver Technology (IST). In short, using IST, the configurator solves the entire problem — no matter how large, deep, and complex — in one shot, using whatever information it has.
Using a smart blend of constraints and rules in our product model, our CPQ engine can process a request and intelligently derive a solution. Again, no matter how big or complex the problem: whether you are configuring the Salesforce Tower or a toasted bagel sandwich, IST solves the whole thing based on the rules and constraints in your product model and the request of the user.
Easy to set up and maintain
At Veloce, we thought long and hard about how to economically describe configuration problems in a way that is natural for humans to understand and easy to maintain over the lifetime of the CPQ system. This is the third pillar of our solution after performance/scalability and high end solving capability: easy creation and maintainability.
We at Veloce believe easy creation and maintenance of your CPQ solution is critical. If it’s not easy to admin, why bother with a CPQ product? Seriously.
The first step in providing easy system admin is our product modeling language (PML). Before you get scared by the mention of a language, let me clarify that you do not have to learn PML to use Veloce CPQ, since we have a visual administration system that creates the PML for you. However, we’ll explain in a bit why having a PML is highly advantageous.
Veloce uses PML to describe a configuration system as an object-oriented hierarchy of types that have attributes that are tied together by rules and constraints. Veloce PML is simple and declarative. It supports type inheritance to minimize duplication in your model. It is the purest and simplest declaration of CPQ logic possible.
The PML offers all the types of constraints and rules needed to solve any complex CPQ problem. Storing the PML as a single consolidated file makes it easy to manipulate for various purposes.
Easy creation and maintenance with intuitive visual administration tools
Veloce provides a visual modeling tool that is entirely point and click so your non-technical business people can create powerful product models that can solve real enterprise problems in less than five minutes.
After the product model, the second part of the CPQ administration is the user interface or how you present your CPQ solution to your users. We found that competitor CPQ products including the market leader offer a single standard user interface with no tools to create multiple user interfaces for each of your sales channels. To address this problem we offer an out-of-the-box tool to easily associate your product model with user interface templates that can be taken as-is or customized with any HTML and CSS to create any user interface your web design team can imagine.
Flexible and portable product model
Why, you might wonder, do we need to have a language? Having an underlying language confers some important advantages to our system. First of all, it makes our product model portable. That is, our product model can be stored in any place — say any number of CRM or PLM systems. Compare that to relying on the specific object model of a single CRM along with your codebase in a single CRM. What happens when you want to work with second CRM? Quite frankly, you’re stuck. You’ll have to recode your entire product in the new CRM, not to mention relate your new code to the object model of the second CRM.
Veloce CPQ has no such problem. Any CRM, PML, ERP, or literally any cloud-based platform or client can easily call our microservice through a RESTful API.
The second advantage of having a PML file: we can easily version our product models. Veloce CPQ has a built-in release process that includes full versioning capability. Ask our competitor how they do this without a PML.
The third advantage of our PML: it can be derived, not just from our visual admin tool, but from any other source or method. Remember how we built a migration tool from our competitor’s data model over a weekend for performance testing? Since we have a PML, we can create scripts or programs to automatically build our PML from another source. This not only makes migration from another solution possible it makes it quick and painless.
Automated migration tools from Apttus, Siebel and others
Our first such migration tool is Veloce’s unique Siebel Migration Tool. Since our team developed Siebel Configurator, we have made sure to incorporate every feature of Siebel configurator as a subset of our overall CPQ capabilities. This includes both product configuration and pricing.
Our configurator and pricer, by the way, run as separate modules that can be used separately, combined, or even added to existing CPQ solutions to extend their capability. In fact, our joint solution with Salesforce CPQ does exactly this.
“Veloce extends our native CPQ solution to handle larger or more complex problems for our customers who require that power.” — Salesforce representative
The power and problems of Siebel
Customers who are still using Siebel today will know both the qualities and problems of Siebel. We have taken Siebel’s powerful capability to the next level by overcoming its shortcomings (knowing them all so well as the original author of Siebel). The most obvious problem with Siebel is that it is not cloud-based and requires maintenance of on-premise hardware and software systems. Most enterprises using Siebel today are looking for a way to migrate their on-premise systems to the cloud. In most cases, that cloud destination is Salesforce.
Veloce CPQ: finally a product that matches (and surpasses) Siebel’s powerful CPQ
The long sought missing piece to the Siebel->Salesforce migration puzzle has been a CPQ technology that equals the power of Siebel. Before Veloce, there simply has not been a CPQ product running on Salesforce with capability comparable to Siebel’s. Siebel has persisted primarily due to its ability to handle complexity better than anyone else. Companies with complex CPQ requirements in areas like telecom have continued to spend on sizable license costs and personnel with specialized skills to maintain Siebel. Companies have even built or licensed 3rd party software to enable communication between Siebel and their Salesforce instances.
Veloce’s Siebel Migration Tool (SMT)
Veloce CPQ’s Siebel Migration Tool (SMT) replaces the power of Siebel while eliminating its associated costs and problems. Veloce SMT provides a one-click migration of any Siebel product model into Veloce CPQ’s PML which runs instantly on Salesforce with the same exact CPQ behavior but with multiple advantages:
- No more need for Siebel on-premise systems
- No more need for teams of Siebel specialists to maintain Siebel
- No more need for software to bridge the gap between Siebel and Salesforce
- Improved performance
- More intuitive modeling
- More predictable configurator behavior
- Perfect “horizontal” scalability on modern cloud architecture
- Automatic integration with Salesforce including Salesforce CPQ
- Intuitive, point and click product model and UI development tools
- Out-of-the-box tools to create multi-channel deployments for internal sales or eCommerce using the same underlying product model
Migration from Apttus and any other CPQ system
This begs the question, if we can migrate so easily from Siebel, what stops us from migrating from other CPQ systems? And answer is, there is nothing stopping us from doing that.
So if your company is dissatisfied with your present CPQ system, in any way, we would love to hear from you.
Use of the latest in intelligent web technologies: Voice-driven CPQ
Veloce CPQ provides a unique feature: Voice-driven CPQ which allows your users to talk to our CPQ system to get real-time intelligent responses.
Combining Voice-driven CPQ with our Intelligent Solver Technology and our unparalleled real-time responsiveness offers the most intelligent and human-like CPQ interaction available where users speak in natural language and get complete intelligent configurations in response.
This can be used for relatively simple product configuration and pricing guidance to the most complex multi-level configurations imaginable.
It’s the combination of these 3 unique features that make the human quality of the interaction: smart voice recognition, intelligent solution generation, and real-time responsiveness.
Easy extensibility
Every CPQ vendor will tell you that their product solves any CPQ problem “out of the box” without code. We would love to tell you this as well. And we have done our best to create the fastest and most powerful CPQ engine with the most intuitive administration tools on the market.
At the same time, as professionals with extensive experience with real CPQ deployments over the last 20 years, we are mature enough to admit that sometimes an extension is required to get the job done.
Now, rather than denying this or sweeping it under the rug, so to speak, we have built easy extensibility into our core product for those rare but critical cases when you need a bit of extra logic to solve your problem.
What does that mean? It means that when that special requirement emerges where, say a simple procedure cuts through the problem where rules and constraints would be awkward or convoluted, we offer natural means to extend our product namely through: custom constraints, custom engine goals, and custom pricing procedures.
The bottom line: we can say with all certainty with our feet firmly on the ground that we can solve any CPQ problem through our native engine capabilities plus custom extensions when required.
Conclusion
Veloce is created fresh with no legacy baggage, using an optimal mix of the latest in modern cloud technologies. It runs on any modern cloud instance. And it takes advantage of modern cloud architecture for performance and scalability. We created Veloce for you. If you have challenges in any of these areas, we know we can help. If you’d like to see what Veloce can do for you, request a demo today.
