CRM giant Salesforce is working to fortify the quoting and billing functions of its software platform. To do so, the customer relationship management company just snapped up SteelBrick.
Financial terms of Salesforce’s acquisition of the six-year-old startup were not disclosed in the announcement. But the technology giant’s regulatory filing reveals the deal is worth $360 million. That’s about half of the rumored price on the street. Salesforce could not immediately be reached for comment.
SteelBrick offers a “quote-to-cash suite” of software. The suite includes configure, price, quote (CPQ) and billing apps. The acquisition appears to make sense on many levels. Beyond Salesforce’s need to beef up its offerings in the quoting and billing arenas, SteelBrick’s software-as-a-service apps are built natively on the Salesforce App Cloud. That makes integration seamless, according to the company.
Mission Complete
“Over the past six years, we’ve been on a mission to make selling simple by developing next generation configure, price, quote and subscription billing apps, optimized for small- and mid-sized companies, on the Salesforce cloud platform with speed and ease,” said Godard Abel, CEO of SteelBrick, in a statement.
SteelBrick’s software works to help sales team create accurate quotes more quickly than manual processes, he added. Teams can also submit orders from desktops or mobile devices and generate proposals, contracts and invoices. The software has a tool to collect cash and manage revenue recognition, which is important for tax compliance purposes.
SteelBrick counts over 350 high-growth companies as customers, including Cloudera, Nimble Storage, HootSuite and Marketo. Cloud investors like Emergence Capital, Institutional Venture Partners, Salesforce Ventures, and Shasta Ventures have put $78 million into the company.
A Quick Update
Earlier this week, SteelBrick launched a new version of its quote-to-cash software, updating the configure, price, quote and billing functions.
Specifically, the winter 2016 release offers more than 80 updates that aim to improve sales and administrator productivity. Dynamic configuration bundling is a welcome feature for users in this space, along with dynamic pricing calculations and advanced pricing rules. These updates should pave the way for faster performance and make it easier to handle cost-based pricing scenarios, Salesforce said.
The update also packs in stronger support for quoting in multiple languages and a new theming engine so customers can customize the branding. Other improvements include the ability to cancel mass invoices, more flexible data payment plan creation, more payment gateway acceptance and the ability to send group invoices to multiple customers and for multiple orders.
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