Callidus Testimonial
Vijay Pendyala, Vice President, Development at Callidus Software
About Callidus
Callidus is a leader in sales performance management. We’ve been in business for close to 10 years. We are a public related company. We are basically a product company. We deliver products and perform sales performance management. Since we are Product Company, we have technical support which is to primarily support our customers. We also offer two kinds of solutions, we have something called on-premise where the customer licenses the product, takes it in-house and implements and we also have an on-demand delivery model i.e. the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery model where we host solutions for customers on our platform. That’s one of our prime businesses, SaaS, the delivery and technical operations around that. We also have implementation services where we work with our customers to successfully roll out our product.
Why Callidus choose Sierra Atlantic
I think as a company, we strategically wanted to get more profitable and also have a presence, a global presence. We’ve been in business for almost ten years and what we are really looking for is to have an offshore presence so that we have all lines of business, to leverage the global presence. I think the reasons why we picked Sierra Atlantic is because we were looking for a mid size IT services company that has prior experience working with ISVs and also delivering services across all streams or lines of business. I think primarily for engineering, support and operations and other areas we were looking for an IT company which had experience and which also has both engineering and managerial experience. We actually went through several rounds and we picked a couple of vendors and I think we’ve chosen Sierra Atlantic more because of their experience and what they had delivered with the other vendors.
Infrastructure quality and other facilities
It’s been very good actually. Before we go to infrastructure and facility, the first thing is that I kind of look at it more in the resources. I think Sierra Atlantic has been really good in getting us quality resources that we need for the kind of services that we want to get from them and especially around engineering which I run along with the other businesses like technical operations and technical support. I think we’ve got quality resources along with the right technical experience. Coming to facilities, Sierra Atlantic has a very nice campus here. Every time I come here I feel so good. It’s actually better than our office. It has very nice facilities and one thing I like is it houses everyone here which is really good. In terms of infrastructure, with all the connectivity that it has and its experience with other vendors, I think it’s been pretty good.
Technical and Managerial Expertise
Yes, I think I would start with executive commitment, that’s what we kind of looked at. That is also one of the reasons we picked Sierra Atlantic. It offers the right kind of focus for us as a company. We are a midsize company and we wanted a services company that would actually be focused and be committed to us. The other part that we liked is Sierra Atlantic’s executive presence in the U.S. They’re based in Fremont and we felt that having executives there would bring close attention for us. That’s what we expected when we had gotten on board and I think and in the last two years the commitment has been good. We had good interactions with the executives and the focus has been very good. Coming to the technical expertise of the resources as I said, we are primarily a Java J2EE shop and we’ve gotten good technical resources and the right kind of experience that we looked for and the leadership and management. We’ve always looked for someone who has always worked with other ISV vendors and when we looked at Sierra Atlantic we wanted to experience. We know that you guys worked with Siebel, Oracle and PeopleSoft and other vendors. We always felt that Sierra Atlantic has the right management and leadership that would help us and that really did work for us.
Initial apprehensions
Yes, I think the number one apprehension is employee retention, especially when you go offshore. During the selection process Sierra Atlantic gave us statistics that said that its retention was the lowest compared to other industries. Certainly that’s one apprehension based on my past experience with offshore and once we’d gotten on board we’d seen that whatever was shared with us, I think the retention has been as good or better and I am very pleased. Even today we kind of think that its been one of the big reasons and we are very glad that we picked Sierra Atlantic. The second one is infrastructure. I think that’s always a concern. We have all the equipment, the servers in the U.S and how individuals can connect from here and perform the day to day tasks. That is one of the concerns we had. We had initial challenges which are possible for every engagement and we’ve overcome that and we are very pleased.
Strategical fit with Callidus
Certainly our strategy is to have a global presence and also deliver more solutions to the market and more rapid development and go to-market rapid solutions. We also want to have low cost solutions and offer 24/7 coverage. With Sierra Atlantic we wanted to achieve that. We started off with engineering and moved on to technical operations, technical support and professional services. It’s been really good that we achieved what we wanted with Sierra Atlantic.
On increase in team size
Basically, we didn’t want to invest when we started. We wanted to gradually see the success and set goals and milestones as we went. We were extremely pleased as we passed each milestone. We incrementally added resources. We started off with ten resources and I’m pleased ro say that in 18-19 months we have up to fifty resources with Sierra Atlantic.
Callidus Software is the market and technology leader in Sales Performance Management (SPM). Callidus’ customers gain a competitive advantage by maximizing sales cost efficiencies and driving improvements in sales execution. Our award-winning Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications set the standard for performance management across the sales force. Over 2 million employees and channel partners have their performance managed by Callidus Software.
