Selectica Launches Fastraq Sales Execution System for Salesforce.com's AppExchange; Fastraq Delivers Accurate Quotes Fast to Speed Sales Cycles, Extend On-Demand CRM Benefits

Business Wire, Nov 8, 2005

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Selectica, Inc. (Nasdaq:SLTC), a leading provider of sales execution applications, and Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM), the technology and market leader in on-demand customer relationship management (CRM), today announced Fastraq for salesforce.com's AppExchange. Built on the AppExchange on-demand platform, Fastraq for AppExchange is available immediately for preview in the AppExchange at www.appexchange.com, and will be generally available at the same time as the Salesforce Winter '06 release. Fastraq allows Salesforce.com users to accelerate sales transactions by improving the speed and accuracy of product configuration, quoting and pricing, regardless of product complexity or channel distribution.

Built on 20 years of rules-based modeling, configuration and quoting experience across multiple industries, Fastraq by Selectica brings an unprecedented power to closing sales by automating and streamlining the sales quoting process and eliminating bottlenecks and errors prevalent in today's manually intensive sales quote activity. Despite improvements to sales force automation technologies, for many companies, quoting complex products remains an undisciplined, highly fragmented process. Depending on product complexity, manual processes and other inefficiencies can result in anywhere from a 20 percent to 80 percent error rate in customer quotes, according to the 2004 AMR Research report, Quoting Complex Products Across Multiple Sales Channels. The report found quote and order accuracy as the primary driver for companies exploring a software solution to the sales configuration problem, with the majority of the companies interviewed for report also citing speed to quote as a primary business benefit.

With AppExchange, salesforce.com customers now have access to new applications that bring the benefits of salesforce.com to their entire business, letting them manage and share all of their company information on-demand. Using AppExchange, companies can easily add new apps to their existing Salesforce deployments, extending their success and making the full power and creativity of the salesforce.com customer and partner community available with just a click.

"AppExchange makes the collective power and creativity of all of our partners available to our 308,000 subscribers with just a few clicks," said Adam Gross, director of product marketing, salesforce.com. "Selectica's Fastraq is an important addition to the AppExchange, and will help companies automate the complex, manual processes of product quoting to create orders, and achieve faster, more streamlined sales cycles."

A Critical Link Between CRM and ERP

A natural link between existing CRM and ERP applications, Fastraq is a comprehensive Web-based solution that allows product selection directly from a catalog or can easily guide the user through complex configurations. The configurations are quickly validated and passed to the quoting component to assign prices and generate a customer-ready quote. Fastraq's automated functionality allows sales teams in the field to seamlessly and rapidly move from opportunity to quote in a highly orchestrated fashion inside Salesforce, with no manual roadblocks to slow down the process. Sales managers benefit from the ability to quickly assess the sales quote pipeline with the most current information by sales rep, geography, product, customer, configuration and other variables for an accurate, real-time view of the business.

Fastraq also includes a robust Marketing Workbench that greatly reduces the time and effort required to make changes to product catalogues, configuration rules and pricing options to ensure sales teams and customers have the most current product information available. This also allows product marketing teams to respond rapidly to market and product changes and new product introductions. These changes can be immediately and simultaneously implemented across the entire sales force. Salesforce users will find the familiar Web interface easy to use, eliminating the need for additional training.

"Enterprises of all sizes need power tools to maneuver through complex sales situations as quickly and efficiently as possible," said James Dias, vice president of worldwide marketing and sales at Selectica. "Fastraq draws on our proven track record for taking the complexity out of sales configuration and quoting to help sales teams develop better solutions, close more deals and recognize revenue faster. As an on-demand application, integrated into the leading Web-based CRM tool, it delivers these benefits much quicker and cost-effectively than traditional installed software applications."

Fastraq is the second on-demand product offering Selectica introduced this year. The company's Contract Performance Management solution, the result of its acquisition of the assets of Determine Software in May 2005, is the industry's only full-function, subscription-based contract lifecycle management product capable of automating the creation, storage, management and analysis of contractual relationships and commitments. According to an IDC report released in July, on-demand software spending will double between 2004 and 2009 to $10.7 billion, a 21 percent compounded annual growth rate.