Speed up standard business processes and accelerate growth with the new API Composer in Veloce CPQ: The Veloce API Manager.
Veloce’s highly anticipated R4 release includes a revolutionary API composer that allows third party systems to custom integrate easily with Veloce CPQ.
Leading CPQ Apps Are Exposing APIs
Application programming interfaces (“APIs”) have become increasingly important in modern quoting systems, as they enable businesses to better serve their customers by providing seamless integrations and data exchange between different systems and sales channels.
According to a Gartner report, leading quote-to-cash vendors are exposing APIs to support sales channels that require a custom user interface (UI).
First of all, what does it mean to ‘expose an API’?
When you expose an API, you offer access to your business logic through an interface (the API), while controlling which data you want shown or not.
Why is this important?
Why the Ability to Expose APIs Is Needed
With customers expecting a seamless quoting experience across various channels, it can be challenging for companies to meet these expectations while also maintaining efficiency and accuracy in their sales processes.
Basic, out of the box APIs may not be enough to provide all the custom access that various third party applications may require. For instance, various sales channels, such as website or e-commerce platform might require a custom UI because the interface on that sales channel is different from the way data is displayed in the CRM.
Typical CPQ Apps Make Their APIs Available
To go beyond basic API integrations, some modern quote-to-cash vendors make their APIs available to their customers for custom API composition. This allows their customers to connect different systems and build a seamless and efficient quoting process.
However, with most of these APIs, we see the following challenges, even from market-leading CPQ vendors.
Challenge #1: API is too generic and low level
We have seen customers need to spend a lot of time to get familiar with how to utilize various APIs (and the proper order of API calls) in order to complete such simple tasks as:
- Initiating product configuration
- retrieving a list of products
- adding a product to the configuration
- reading and saving the quote.
When CPQ is difficult for sales teams to use, it won’t be adopted and ROI will be low, if any. That is, IF the CPQ event gets into implementation, because sometimes when API is too restricted, implementation can be a time-consuming and frustrating process.
Some CPQ projects fail here.
Challenge #2: Difficulty Adapting API Leads To System Limitations
We also see that customers of ‘modern’ CPQ vendors using basic APIs may have difficulty adapting the API to fit their specific needs, such as reading data from external data sources, or calling an Apex class when Salesforce CRM is being used.
When the business is not able to achieve the business requirements, customers have to unnecessarily compromise their processes.
Challenge #3: Niche design and Poor Performance
The “one-size-fits-all” design can result in poor performance, such as when a system returns an entire dataset when only a specific portion is needed. It’s not just extra data returned, it’s bandwidth and time wasted.
Poor performance often leads to extremely poor user experience and adoption, which will ultimately result in decrease of sales.
The Bottom Line of Poor API Composition
So, while we see ‘modern’ market-leading CPQ vendors exposing APIs for their customers, we continue to see CPQ apps that are:
- Difficult to implement, with poor adoption
- Unable to meet business requirements
- Poorly adopted due to poor performance
All of which lead ultimately to decreased sales and revenue.
Building a Custom API Layer
To address some of these challenges, many customers of traditional CPQ vendors choose to build a custom integration layer.
This involves developing a custom solution to handle the integration of different systems, rather than using a pre-existing solution or APIs provided by the vendors.
This is a good approach if the organization needs to have complete control over the integration process and tailor it to their specific needs and requirements.
However, building and maintaining a custom integration layer can also be a time-consuming and resource-intensive process.
No Custom API Layer is needed with Veloce CPQ
Here’s where Veloce’s R4 release shines. We have developed a revolutionary approach to composing APIs within your CPQ platform.
API Manager is a low code tool that allows customers to dynamically build and expose high level APIs using low-level building blocks.
Low-Level API Approach
Here is a look at what low-level APIs look like in a typical basic API approach: Diagram A, titled Before. You can see the integration appears much more complicated and redundant than what is displayed in the Diagram B.
High-Level API Approach
Here is a look at the simplicity of High Level API composition that is available to Veloce CPQ users using low-code point and click building blocks.
Integrations are cleaner:
- Simplifying complex APIs. Veloce’s API Composer provides a simplified and unified interface to the underlying system, abstracting away the complexity and providing a consistent and easy-to-use interface for API consumers.
- Improving performance. With Veloce’s API Composer API performance can be improved by reducing the number of calls to the underlying system APIs and batching multiple requests into a single call.
What This Means for Veloce Customers
Following our mission to make the smartest and easiest to use enterprise quote-to-cash software available, Veloce’s API Composer makes easy integration of your CPQ platform with other systems.
This means you can go about scaling your business in any direction with full support from your quote-to-cash platform.
