(4 votes, average: 3.75 out of 5)
Loading ...Ventana Research recently released their Sales Performance Management Value Index 2009 research paper which benchmarks four leading SPM solution suppliers and their solutions.
Unlike the Gartner SPM report which I have discussed a few times, the Ventana Value Index evaluates how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements for software that enables and supports Sales Performance Management. The Index evaluates the software in the context of seven key categories: adaptability, manageability, reliability, usability, functionality, total cost of ownership, and return on investment.
You can jump on their website to download the executive summary after a quick registration.
The research notes that there are 5 vendors providing solutions across the sales performance management spectrum: Callidus Software, Merced Systems, Synygy, Varicent Software and Xactly Corporation. The other solution providers were out of the scope because their offerings are too broad (focus on CRM and Sales Force Automation) or too specific (focus on only a certain area of SPM or on a specific industry).
As expected, after compiling the weighted scores for each category, the value index difference is within 1% for the top 3 vendors (Callidus, Varicent and Merced), with Xactly lagging only a few percents behind. Most categories yielded very close results, with the largest (but still small) gaps in the capability and validation categories.
These results are not extremely surprising since the research focused on how well the SPM offerings met the buyers’ requirements, and since most SPM solutions offer very similar core functionality. However, this doesn’t mean that there are no significant differences in how, or how well the solutions handle various SPM requirements.
As for Synygy, some things could be inferred from a company concerned to be benchmarked against competitors by an independent research firm.
Synygy is ALWAYS afraid of impartial evaluation of it’s products. As far as I know Synygy only allows evaluation of it’s products if it is certain that the results will be favorable and it has some control over the evaluator.
Synygy also has a disturbing habit of running to the courthouse whenever it thinks that it’s business is in trouble. See Synygy v. Scott-Levin, which Synygy lost both initially and on appeal. Also see Synygy v. ZS Associates, still in litigation but Synygy’s case looks very weak so far.