Xactly Corporation, (www.xactlycorp.com), the leader in automated on-demand sales compensation management, announced that they are working on a strategic alliance with RightNow Technologies. Through the combination of RightNow's service, sales, and marketing solutions and Xactlyas sales compensation management solutions, businesses can drive significant sales performance and service staff effectiveness.

Ensuring a superior customer experience is critical in todayas competitive marketplace. RightNowas next-generation CRM solutions help organizations improve the customer experience and drive revenue. Motivating sales and service staff is a critical component to any customer experience strategy; focused and well compensated sales representatives are more likely to provide the high touch experience customers expect.

aXactly Incent is an excellent complement to RightNowas offerings,a said Christopher W. Cabrera, Xactly founder, president and CEO. aBy teaming with RightNow, Xactly will be able to provide clients with on-demand sales, services and compensation management solutions. Empowering sales and services personnel with real-time visibility into their sales compensation and performance will help organizations better align sales teams to deliver a world-class customer experience and maximize revenue growth.a

The combination of Xactly Incentas rules-based, services-oriented architecture, and RightNowas solutions can help organization clients in such diverse industries as high technology, telecom, travel and hospitality, public sector, education and financial services to quickly build compensation plans that are specific to their organizations. For example, RightNow Service customers will be able to design variable compensation plans for service or call center employees based on the key performance indicators that mean the most to their business success such as response time, call volume, new versus completed cases, call resolution or average handling time.

aTodayas customers have unprecedented choice and control,a said Greg Gianforte, CEO and founder of RightNow. aSuperior customer experiences are the only definitive way to retain and expand relationships with customers. Compensating and motivating sales and service staff is a step in delivering these types of stellar interactions.a

Xactly is the first and only company completely focused on delivering a 100% on-demand sales compensation management solution. It also is the first and only company to deliver a true multi-tenant solution in a SAS 70 Type II certified environment. This single-minded approach enables Xactly to minimize hardware and software infrastructure costs a savings that are then passed on to customers a and accelerate the process by which it delivers new features and functionality.

Prior to the advent of Xactly Incent, companies had to rely on spreadsheets to manage sales compensation or alternative enterprise solutions which were simply too expensive, time consuming and difficult to implement for all but the largest companies. Xactly Incentas on-demand approach has resulted in companies for the first time being able to realize the power and benefits of an enterprise sales compensation application at a fraction of the cost and avoid all the headaches associated with enterprise applications a lengthy and expensive implementations, large up-front software license and maintenance fees, costly hardware and complex upgrades.

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Via TMCNet Smart Online Inc., a vendor of Software-as-a-Service for the small business market, has announced the release of its newly enhanced Web-based Accounting product.

The Accounting application is part of a full suite including group Calendar, Contact Management, Salesforce Automation, Customer Relationship Management and Human Resource Management that can be private labeled for corporations who desire to offer value-added products and services to their small business customers.

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Dennis Howlett has the scoop on British Telecom's version of AppExchange (Salesforce.com's ecosystem for 3rd party developers). Last week, BT made a presentation to 200 software companies at Microsoft's UK HQ. BT's customer base includes 27 million consumers and 1.8 million small businesses; it wants to develop a marketing and distribution channel for 3rd party SaaS apps. It hinted that successful partners may find themselves acquired over time. (Last November Silicon.com noted that BT has a dedicated team of scouts who identify, evaluate and acquire hundreds of new technologies per year.)

BT cites an IDC survey that's summarized here by David Terrar. It showed that "the value of software is no longer determined by the functionality available, but by users' feelings and experience as they interact with the solution." Also, end users want predictable licensing and maintenance costs, and they prefer having their applications managed by someone else. IDC concludes that SaaS growth (20%/year) will far outpace software growth (6%). (In a 2005 report, IDC estimated that the web hosting market will grow by 16%/year through 2010.)

More hereDennis Howlett has the scoop on British Telecom's version of AppExchange (Salesforce.com's ecosystem for 3rd party developers). Last week, BT made a presentation to 200 software companies at Microsoft's UK HQ. BT's customer base includes 27 million consumers and 1.8 million small businesses; it wants to develop a marketing and distribution channel for 3rd party SaaS apps. It hinted that successful partners may find themselves acquired over time. (Last November Silicon.com noted that BT has a dedicated team of scouts who identify, evaluate and acquire hundreds of new technologies per year.)

BT cites an IDC survey that's summarized here by David Terrar. It showed that "the value of software is no longer determined by the functionality available, but by users' feelings and experience as they interact with the solution." Also, end users want predictable licensing and maintenance costs, and they prefer having their applications managed by someone else. IDC concludes that SaaS growth (20%/year) will far outpace software growth (6%). (In a 2005 report, IDC estimated that the web hosting market will grow by 16%/year through 2010.)

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Microsoft today took the next step toward offering Dynamics CRM via the Software as a Service model, releasing the next major release to select partners through its Technology Adoption Program (TAP).Partners will be able to test Microsoft's foray into multi-tenant hosting, entitled Microsoft CRM Live, building vertical applications, mash ups and integration connectors. The Live application and the next version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, code named "Titan," are scheduled for release this summer.

"This is our first key external milestone in the launch toward CRM Live," said Christian Pederson, Senior Director for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. "We are now on a path to follow up and extend with a broad partner engagement."

Microsoft has high expectations for its new multi-tenant application that will allow users to share the costs of managing the application.

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NetSuite has rolled out Employee Resource Management (ERM) to enable workers to perform project-related chores, and access human resource-related documents.

The new capabilities are part of the NetSuite Employee Centre, a self-service portal integrated within NetSuite's overall software-as-a-service platform, which also includes enterprise resource planning, customer-relationship management and e-commerce applications.
aNetSuiteas new ERM capabilities make it as easy to manage employees as it is to manage the rest of your business, such as customer and vendor transactions,a said Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite.

aIn the past, HR departments required complex integrations between their HRIS system and their financial system. Now, they can empower their employees and managers with self-service and integrated expense reporting, as well as eliminating the red tape and cost of administering purchase management, time tracking and payroll through disparate applications.a

The new services enable employees to track time by project, and enter expense reports and purchase requests, which managers can approve online. HR can also use the service to provide employees with documents on benefits, job performance and reviews, company policies, new hire information, company holiday schedules and other information. Managers can approve employee time and expenses, and relevant data flows automatically to payroll, billing, and the general ledger a greatly improving efficiency and accuracy.

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