At Ingres, Salesforce Deployment Results in Dramatic Return on Investment

“Salesforce has been a smashing success. We had our CRM system deployed and live in a matter of days. It will take me 5 years before I’ve spent as much on Salesforce as it would have cost just to purchase the licenses for Oracle’s Siebel On Premise software.”


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 software as a service (SaaS) and open source models to drastically reduce operating costs and streamline processes.

Solution
  • With help from salesforce.com implementation partner DSG, Ingres deployed Salesforce Enterprise Edition to 30 users in sales and marketing in 2 weeks.
  • Salesforce.com’s Successforce Consulting also migrated Ingres’ data from a legacy billing application to Salesforce in only 5 days.
  • Ingres decided to deploy Intacct Corporation’s SaaS-based financial management applications from the AppExchange marketplace. The hosted ERP solution integrates bidirectionally with Salesforce, providing additional efficiencies.
  • Ingres tailored Salesforce 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.
  • The AppExchange’s rich application ecosystem lets Ingres add new features such as ExactTarget email management capabilities to Salesforce.
  • Ingres is currently evaluating Salesforce Customer Portal and Salesforce Content to extend its Salesforce deployment beyond CRM.

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