These risks have always existed, but never more so than in the past several years. In ATG’s area of focus – managing customers and revenue — many vendor segments have been a hotbed of new company start-up, failures, consolidations, and mergers. Configure Price Quote (CPQ), Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM), and Billing and Revenue Management have experienced tremendous tumult in the past several years.

For our clients, often these consolidations have massive ramifications and upset carefully orchestrated architectures that may have been counting on vendor roadmap functionality that is now in jeopardy. When we make vendor recommendations to clients we evaluate Functional, Technical, Commercial, and Intangible fit of vendors. Vendor risk exists under the Intangible category, but it is becoming a larger factor in the overall decision.

Occasionally, however, the consolidations go the other way, and actually ‘de-risk’ the environment for our clients. This is how we feel about the Salesforce SteelBrick acquisition. Salesforce has a strong track record for the vendor risks that I mentioned above, and SteelBrick had an exemplary record of customer success in the CPQ space before the acquisition.

Many of our clients are consolidating on Salesforce to handle all of their major customer touch points. The introduction of SteelBrick CPQ and Billing will provide additional capabilities to manage the critical sales and revenue funnels that are the lifeblood of our clients. While there are a number of quality CPQ solutions in the marketplace, we are excited about the value and risk proposition that is offered by Salesforce and SteelBrick.

Heck, I might even bring it up my next poker night. On second thought…