Why SAS 70 Certification Matters at Both the Data Center and the Application

Automating key business processes may not be the first thing companies are thinking of when evaluating their compliance initiatives, but certainly the two go hand-in-hand. According to a recent study by AMR Research, 42 percent of respondents reported that streamlining business processes is a primary benefit of good governance, risk management and compliance practices.

Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) legislation has forced companies to implement greater internal controls. Given the importance of this issue, shouldn’t technology vendors be required to deliver solutions that meet the highest professional standards for ensuring internal controls?

Xactly thinks so. We have had Type II SAS 70 certification at our data center for some time and have extended this leadership position when we announced this week that Xactly Incent successfully completed a Type I SAS 70 audit. By way of this achievement, Xactly Incent is the first independently validated SAS 70 on-demand sales compensation management application hosted in a SAS 70 Type II certified facility underscoring Xactly’s commitment to providing customers maximum assurances with regard to compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) regulations and concerns over outsourced controls. SAS 70 refers to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants Statement on Auditing Standard (SAS) No. 70 that defines the standards used by an auditor to assess the internal controls of a service organization.

But what’s important is not that Xactly is the only on-demand sales compensation management company that can claim its application and hosting facility are both SAS 70 certified. The critical point is that now companies can get automation and security without paying exorbitant enterprise software prices. The long-standing enterprise software company criticism that on-demand solutions are not secure is no longer viable.

Simply put, SOX is too important to be taken lightly. Companies can hold vendors accountable by engaging only those whose applications and hosting facilities have been certified SAS 70 compliant.

Once again, Xactly has raised the bar by putting in place the most rigorous controls.

Post-Sales Data at the Center of the Ultimate Sales Performance Management Experience

Delivering a world-class customer experience is a goal for any forward-looking organization. In Xactly’s case, the focus is on providing customers with the ultimate sales performance management experience, a result we can deliver by providing companies the means to aggregate, cleanse, centralize and analyze post-sales data on-demand.

Last week Xactly announced its product roadmap for the next 18 months. The big picture is that over the coming months, Xactly will deliver the most comprehensive array of on-demand sales performance management solutions from a single vendor. Available now is Xactly Incent 3.2, a Web-based incentive compensation application that enables medium-size enterprises in any industry to improve sales effectiveness and maximize profits. A new, complementary module for Xactly Incent, Xactly Modeling™, empowers finance and sales to determine the impact of commissions expense forecast, organization plan and compensation plan changes in advance of implementing them. And to provide greater options for seamless connectivity, we have made available an open set of APIs called Xactly Connect™. These recent additions round out the Xactly product family including Xactly Data Management™ and Xactly Analytics™ announced last year. And coming soon is Xactly Rewards™, a non-cash incentive capability to augment your cash incentive programs as well as Xactly Territory ™, Xactly Quota ™, Xactly Forecast/Planning ™ and Xactly Price Management™.

But the meat of the news from Xactly last week addresses the critical need companies have to automate sales and finance business processes in and around sales performance management, and to create an on-demand repository for this data that is centralized, secure and hosted.

Fortunately for customers, Xactly gets this. Xactly’s vision is to help companies leverage this business data to automate mission critical business processes that comprise sales performance management to help companies improve operational performance and maximize profits. By aggregating data from a variety of disparate systems and feeding it to the Xactly Incent sales compensation management application, customers gain a one-stop shop for all sales performance-related data. Coupled with the Xactly Analytics module, customers can slice-and-dice data to determine what products were sold, to whom, through which channels, and at what price. The result is the most accurate reflection of what’s going on in the field a company can have. Let’s take a look at an example: Imagine that you are a hardware vendor and you have just sold a million dollar deal to IBM. IBM is located on the East coast, so it is booked on the East, but it was the West coast team that closed the deal. The process of calculating compensation takes into account all of these dynamics and scrubs the data so you have the clearest possible picture of what was sold in which geography, transaction by transaction. This means that after the compensation process, you truly have the richest and most accurate data in your company.

At the center of any company’s sales performance management strategy is the business data which includes what products have been sold to whom, through which channels, in which geographies and at what price points. Xactly Corporation is uniquely suited to automate several key business processes for finance and sales that leverage this business data including quota and territory management, price management and forecast/planning in addition to the capabilities it offers today

In the above diagram, the inner circle illustrates Xactly's core focus for delivering on-demand sales performance management, while the outer ring represents Xactly's ecosystem of partner strategies whose solutions are synergistic to Xactly Incent. Through such strategies, Xactly is able to provide greater value to customers and partners.

The complete line of Xactly sales performance management solutions have all the rich features you’d expect, and then some. We know customers require greater automation of business processes that enable sales and finance to increase productivity and profits. Our holistic approach is focused on helping companies significantly improve performance by optimizing the effectiveness of selling channels, impacting a business’s bottom-line, and managing risk and compliance.

We also get that customers aren’t interested in patching together point solutions from multiple vendors. Can you imagine buying your car’s engine from one dealer, the frame from another, wheels from a third, and so on? Of course not. Going forward, customers can buy with confidence today knowing that Xactly will deliver the industry’s most comprehensive and integrated on-demand sales performance management suite.

Xactly remains the only sales compensation and sales performance management vendor to offer a 100 percent multi-tenant on-demand architecture, which ensures customers will experience a low total cost of ownership, seamless product upgrades and first-class security.

Customers are truly excited about these innovations. They want their business operations to hum, and Xactly, with its focus on providing a hosted, secure and centralized repository for post-sales data, is uniquely capable of making the ultimate sales performance management dream a reality and the experience world-class.