At Ingres, Salesforce CRM Deployment Results in Dramatic Return on Investment

Challenge

• Ingres©, a leading provider of open source database management software and support services, needed a CRM system to unify data across new regional sales offices in Australia, France, Germany, and Singapore.
• A spin-off from CA, Inc., the company had no servers or data centers, but was in a position to build its computing infrastructure from scratch. 
• Ingres wanted to do business differently so it embraced cloud computing and open source models to drastically reduce operating costs and streamline processes.

Solution

• With help from salesforce.com implementation partner DSG, Ingres deployed Salesforce CRM Enterprise Edition to 30 users in sales and marketing in 2 weeks.
• Salesforce.com Consulting also migrated Ingres’ data from a legacy billing application to Salesforce CRM in only 5 days.
• Ingres decided to deploy Intacct Corporation’s cloud-computing-based financial management applications from the AppExchange marketplace. The hosted ERP solution integrates bidirectionally with Salesforce CRM, providing additional efficiencies.
• Ingres tailored Salesforce CRM to its business needs by building custom tabs such as Business Development, Partner Tools, and DW (Data Warehouse) Solution. The company can add other custom fields and functionality easily.
• AppExchange’s rich application ecosystem lets Ingres add new features such as ExactTarget email management capabilities to Salesforce CRM.
• Ingres is currently evaluating Salesforce CRM's customer portal and content library to extend its Salesforce CRM deployment beyond CRM.

Results

• Ingres has seen a significant return on investment through cost avoidance since deploying Salesforce CRM.
• The company estimates it would have spent $3.5 million deploying a competing CRM solution verses the $160,000 it cost to deploy and implement Salesforce CRM with the help of consultants.
• By integrating Intacct financials through Salesforce CRM rather than deploying a costly on-premise ERP solution, the company estimates it saved another $125,000 on custom integration.
• Salesforce CRM’s easy-to-use interface drives adoption, increasing productivity and success.
• The cloud-computing model frees the company to focus on the business rather than on building infrastructure.