Sterling Commerce receives positive rating from independent research firm in Sales Configuration report

Online, November 10, 2009 (Newswire.com) - London - Sterling Commerce, an AT&T Inc (NYSE:T) company, today announced the company received a Positive rating in the Gartner "MarketScope for Sales Configuration, 3Q09" report (Gene Alvarez, Lilian Dutra). For the report, Gartner evaluated the Sterling Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) solution, part of Sterling Selling and Fulfilment Suite. Sterling CPQ enables companies and their partners to automate the configure, price, quote, and sell processes for complex products and services across their sales channels, helping them increase market share, improve the customer and partner buying experience, and reduce costs.

"Many companies rely on manual processes for configuring complex products and services, which result in a higher cost of sales, slower customer and partner response times, and frequently incorrectly configured and priced products and services," said Cory Wiegert, vice president, Applications Product Line, at Sterling Commerce. "Sterling Commerce, an industry leader in cross channel solutions, understands that to stay competitive today, companies need to transform their entire inquiry-to-cash process by collaborating across their call centres, web channels, stores and direct sales organisations."

The report states that sales configurators like the one rated "Positive" for Sterling Commerce "reduce complexity and improve productivity by helping salespeople or customers in a self-serve environment match customer needs to unique product and service offerings." A Positive rating indicates the company demonstrates strength in specific areas, but execution in one or more areas may still be developing or inconsistent with other areas of performance.

The report continues, "Due to the economy, organisations are focusing on business process improvements, and are evaluating how sales configurators fit into larger sales processes, such as configure to order or opportunity to order. Organisations influenced by this trend are assessing the Web services integration capabilities of these sales tools in particular business processes with capabilities outside of configuration - such as pricing, quoting, proposal and generation - as they seek to increase process efficiency."

Sterling CPQ provides a self-service environment that streamlines the entire configure-to-order process. It helps companies to improve the buying experience by streamlining the configuration and quoting process and to reduce the cost of sales by moving customers and partners to Web self-service and e-commerce. Sterling CPQ offers an easy-to-use configurator that enables business users to easily get products and bundled offerings to market faster. The configurator also improves the buying experience and reduces costs by shielding customers and partners from the complexity of a company's selling environment and back-end systems.

Sterling CPQ is part of Sterling Selling and Fulfilment Suite, a collaborative supply chain solution for managing the entire inquiry-to-cash process. Leveraging the Suite's order management and fulfilment capabilities, Sterling CPQ is able to present valuable available-to-promise order details to consumers when making online purchases and inventory visibility information to CSRs when corresponding with customers regarding their order status.

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The MarketScope is copyrighted 2009 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The MarketScope is an evaluation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the MarketScope, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest rating. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.