Investment in SteelBrick from Former BigMachines Founder Provides Fuel to Salesforce CPQ App Leader

PALO ALTO, Calif., March 13, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- SteelBrick, provider of easy-to-use Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) apps for high-growth Salesforce.com customers, today announced it has received $5 million in capital investment from Godard Abel, the company's new CEO and former co-founder/CEO of BigMachines, and from Matt Gorniak, former global SVP sales/alliances from BigMachines, who will serve as a senior advisor to SteelBrick. Purchased by Oracle last year, BigMachines has been the market leader in CPQ software for the Salesforce and Oracle ecosystems.

"With the recent sale of BigMachines to Oracle, there is an opportunity for the next generation of CPQ leader to emerge in the Salesforce ecosystem," said Abel. "SteelBrick has not only developed unique CPQ technology, but also achieved the highest customer satisfaction in its market. It is CPQ made simple, providing customers with full deployments in 4 to 10 weeks compared to common industry deployments taking a year or longer."

SteelBrick CPQ, formerly known as QuoteQuickly, solves a problem many sales organizations face: producing accurate and professional sales quotes for prospects quickly. SteelBrick CPQ, built and delivered on the Salesforce platform, reduces quoting errors, improves productivity, and ensures pricing and quoting accuracy. Importantly, it allows users to close deals faster without ever leaving the Sales Cloud due to its 100% native configuration.

SteelBrick founder Max Rudman retains a key role with the company as its chief technology officer. "We have a unique opportunity to solidify our leadership in providing easy-to-implement CPQ solutions to high-growth organizations using Salesforce CRM," Rudman said. "I am absolutely thrilled to partner with Godard and his team to capitalize on this opportunity by significantly accelerating our innovation and continuing to deliver on our commitment to customer success."

SteelBrick is using its recent investment to accelerate product development, grow its sales organization, and expand its leadership team to include executives with deep CPQ experience. Among the company's prominent new hires is former BigMachines vice president of marketing, Will Wiegler, as chief marketing officer. Wiegler helped grow BigMachines from $10 million to $50 million in revenue.

"SteelBrick is well positioned to disrupt the CPQ market," said Wiegler. "The software is easy to implement, easy to use, and has a growing base of loyal Salesforce users. We offer an affordable, fast and rock-solid CPQ that is as intuitive to use as Salesforce."

With SteelBrick CPQ, users operate in the familiar Salesforce interface. SteelBrick CPQ offers customizable templates and one-click generation and attachment of proposal and quote documents. Built-in reports and dashboards ensure that sales reps and managers stay up-to-date on quotes that have been generated, as well as those requiring follow-up.

SteelBrick CPQ is an essential business application for a number of well-known high growth companies including HootSuite, Cloudera, Jive, Nimble Storage, Tripwire, and Nutanix. "Enthusiastic customer reviews on Salesforce AppExchange [https://appexchange.salesforce.com] and G2 Crowd [www.g2crowd.com] websites were a strong validation of the success of the company and the product," added Abel. "These unbiased customer endorsements were part of my due diligence process, further supporting the success and potential of SteelBrick."

"Having used other CPQ software in the past with mixed results, I was delighted to discover SteelBrick," said Lars Nilsson, VP of field operations for Cloudera. "We were able to go live with SteelBrick CPQ in two weeks and achieved rapid adoption and ROI. The product has proven to be the right choice for Cloudera. The support and personal attention we have received from the team at SteelBrick has been unmatched."

SteelBrick recently opened an office in Chicago and has hired more than a dozen highly experienced sales, marketing and implementation specialists. The company also launched a new website today. To learn more about SteelBrick and SteelBrick CPQ, visit www.steelbrick.com.

About SteelBrick:

SteelBrick provides easy-to-use Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) apps for high-growth salesforce.com customers. SteelBrick CPQ is 100% native on Salesforce, so users can create accurate and professional sales quotes quickly and error-free, without leaving the Sales Cloud. Many CPQ solutions can take a year or more to go live and often run over budget. SteelBrick takes a different approach by providing out-of-the-box CPQ that simply works and is affordable. For more, go to www.steelbrick.com.

SOURCE SteelBrick